Since we know I’m on tenterhooks, I thought I’d take part in Booking Through Thursday this week:

1. Okay, love him or loathe him, you’d have to live under a rock not to know that J.K. Rowling’s final Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, comes out on Saturday… Are you going to read it?
2. If so, right away? Or just, you know, eventually, when you get around to it? Are you attending any of the midnight parties?
3. If you’re not going to read it, why not?
4. And, for the record… what do you think? Will Harry survive the series? What are you most looking forward to?

Rudi and I have reserved and paid for our copies of HP7 and will be up at Politics and Prose for their Friday night party. I’ve not yet decided if I’ll dress up; it will probably depend on a couple of things (like whether I can find a hat to go with my grad school robe) before Friday at 10 p.m.

Because Politics and Prose isn’t in the easiest section of town to reach, we’ll probably drive up there, which means we will miss out on great commuter reading time. (By the time we metro’d home after picking up our copies in Bethesda the last time, we were already through the first two chapters!) Rudi’s going out on a bike ride Saturday, but I see no reason why I shouldn’t just be able to plow through reading during his absence.

And as for my guesses as to what happens, I’ll save that for Friday’s post. But let’s just say that I’m an eternal optimist when it comes to my book characters. My experience with fantasy novels led me to correctly guess who would not make it through the last book. This time around, I’m less able to say whom I think will die, but quite confident about who will survive to live happily ever after (what I’m looking forward to most). Tune in Friday to find out my thoughts. (And for those who want the guess-free reading experience, yes, I’ll put it past a jump.)

This post ought to be substantial, grounded, focused. It ought to include photos of the garden’s latest harvest (including the magic zucchini) or of my knitting (both knit-along projects are in progress). It ought to be productive about rallying people to protest the underhanded sale of my local branch library by the city council. It ought to be … about something.

But instead all I can offer you is this. This evening after work, it was only July. But now, eight hours later, it’s already January at Hogwarts. Come Friday at midnight, it will be July again. I’ve only got 71 hours to get through the next five months — and a harrowing, event-filled five months they will be.

So my apologies if posts are light — or, worse, inconsequential. I’m looking for clues for what’s to come…

I’m pleased to announce that I will be spending this weekend as weekends are meant to be spent — lazing.

I’m hoping to start the weekend off right with some friends tonight at a free jazz concert in the sculpture garden outside the National Gallery of Art.

Tomorrow morning, I will get up and go for a bike ride. I signed up for the third round of Runagogo! and fully intend to meet the 100 mile goal (over the course of 3 months) this time. Plus, I’ve been drinking a lot of sweet beverages and eating a lot of ice cream lately and it would behoove me to get moving. In a similar vein, I may try to get in some laps at the local community pool when I head over to the garden.

Speaking of which, I need to do some planting. The peas are done for the season and I see no reason to let the string lattice go to waste. So I’m going to plant some more beans there. Rudi’s mom has also suggested that we cut back the catnip and maybe the sage, so that will be another task. We might have some ripe peppers to harvest in addition to the broccoli and lettuce, so I’m excited about that.

I’m about a third of the way through Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and I don’t find it unreasonable to expect to be done with it by Sunday night. That gives me five days to plow through the penultimate book before the new one comes out at midnight on Friday night. We’ll be attending a launch party at Politics & Prose and are currently contemplating costumes. That robe I bought for grad school is going to come in handy again, methinks…

I’ll also be knitting. I’m nearly done with my first pair of socks for the Summer of Socks, in a lovely colorway of Cascade Fixation. I just have to finish the gusset decreases and the foot and I’ll be able to wear them with my pink Keds.

And I have to go buy some cotton/linen/hemp/nonstretchy fiber for a market bag. That’s the project I’m supposed to be working on right now for the Tour de France Knit-along. However, a week into the race, I’m still in London while the other riders race toward the Alps. Tant pis! But Bastille Day does seem like a good time to catch up, so I will play some Les Nubians albums and the soundtrack to Les Miserables and get to work.

Finally, the farmers’ market, is, as always, on my weekend agenda. The market folks warn this may be the final week for cherries and apricots, so I’ll need to pick some of those up, as well as more blueberries and tomatoes and beans and …

We’re off to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I’m excited to see Lupin and Sirius again. I find them some of the more endearing characters in the book series and the film casting has definitely grown on me over time. In fact, it was really too bad that Sirius’ role from the fourth book was cut down to one scene, although I understand that not everything written in a 700-page book will fit into a two-hour movie.

I’ll also be happy to see Mrs. Weasley back, because I love her. I think we all need a Mrs. Weasley in our lives…

It’s looks ready to start pouring out right now, which will make the us a bit soggy for the movie, but I don’t care!

We’re very excited about seeing the film at the great, old-style Uptown Theatre a few miles up the road from us in D.C. We’ll be particularly happy if we get seats up in the balcony, which is truly a wonderful place to see a movie from!

I can’t wait!

Photo courtesy of KCIvey, under the Creative Commons agreement.

My reading mojo had been missing for the last six months, but it seems finally to have returned with a vengeance. This month I finished eight books, the most since last year at this time. (I wonder if that’s just a coincidence or if June has always been a reading high-point for me?) (more…)

The American Library Association meeting was a successful one, both from a work perspective and a personal one.

On the work front, I found this to be the first national conference we’ve attended where librarians en masse seemed excited about our consumer health materials. Whether that was due to overwhelming attendance (and thus merely a larger version of the core audience who had always appreciated our free materials) or to a shift in professional perspective on the topic, I cannot say. But I can say it was very exciting to have to return to the office three times in order to retrieve more material. I hope the books come in use to library communities.

On a personal front, the grand total for the weekend book acquisitions ended up at 21 (including gifts). I paid a whopping $9 to purchase three of the books I wanted for gifts, but otherwise everything was free. I’ve started one of my new books already, but probably won’t get to finish it until next month, so look for a review of it and others at the end of July. (I currently have four other books I’m currently in the middle of reading…)

I also got to have dinner with Bill and Jana of Unshelved. It was a nice, laid-back evening of conversation and Ethiopian food and I came away after dinner feeling more relaxed than I have in a while. (So relaxed, in fact, that I dozed off in front of Trader Joe’s while reading my book after I stopped to buy milk and bread.) As always, I’m impressed by what nice people Bill and Gene know and look forward to meeting Jana, their store manager, again.

The only regret of the weekend is that I missed meeting Maggie, who is hosting the Southern Reading Challenge, which I’m taking part in this summer. Hopefully, I’ll get to catch up with her at some future conference.