Craziness!

Hello all friends!
I have read that some of you have Blogger problems right now. I hope that everything will get solved soon, so that all of us can continue sharing photos and commenting on our buddies posts.

My week was a bag of mixed candies. I was out sick from work on Tuesday with an eye-infection. Not a whole lot adventures were had during the earlier part of the week - unless one counts hours of continuous sleep as adventures (some of the dreams were a tad freaky...). I have not slept that much in years!
Wednesday was back to work, running around and putting presentations together. Right now I am researching the interesting field of women in engineering. The statistics does not look grand; in 2005/2006, women earned 62% of Associate's degrees, 58% of Bachelor's degrees, 60.0% of Master's degrees, and 48.9% of Doctorates, however, only 17% of all Engineering BSc are earned by women... What is worse is that a large part of these women never enter the field of engineering. The women that do often decide to leave after a few years. I am trying to help my company solve this problem, but it is challenging when practically all the executives are men.
Since I work with a lot of very talented female scientists, I generally ask for feedback before I share my findings with management. And here is where the fun begins - one of my friends told me that it was time for me to do something fun and convinced me to go with her to the second part of the Harry Potter marathon in the theater close by.
She had already caught the first marathon run on Wednesday with her daughter, during which the first 4 movies were shown.. I took a half-day on Thursday to enjoy the last 4 movies with her, including HP and the Deathly Hallows part 2 starting Friday morning at 12.01. We had a great time!

At 2 pm, we started out with HP and the Chamber of Secrets. After a 30 minute break, we jumped right into HP and the Half-Blood Prince. Wow - I keep forgetting that these movies are so good! I have to confess that I only watched part 6 and 7 on DVD on the TV screen at home, so it was wonderful to see them in an actual theater. Movies really are better on the big screen! Especially since the last three movies are very dark - not only story-wise, but the movie photography itself is dark too and a therefore I have found it a bit tricky to follow on a TV screen.

After part 6, we started to really get pumped up for the last two movies! We had about 1.5 hrs to get something to eat, meet my friends DH outside, since he was joining us and get some shots of the line. Check this out - here is the line - front:

Side:

Back:

Fans dressed op both themselves and their surroundings (my friend "Marathona" in red dress, her DH in black T-shirt and shorts, and I am the one carrying one of my trusted Vera Bradley bags):

Do you recognize the characters? The girl in the white outfit (she made it herself!) is Hedwig, the guy who looks like ZZ Top is Dumbledore, we have Mrs Weasly, Harry as a baby (his bib says "My Mommy loved me so much that she DIED for me"), Harry as a school boy, and Serios Black. We did also see the Golden Snitch, the free house-elf Dobby, many Gryffindor students, and a bunch of people wearing shirts that spelled out "muggle".
As you can see, fans decorated their cars and the bathrooms. they sat in line from early morning all they way to the first showing of part 8, playing HP games, posing for pictures (they, the people in line, had built a tent with a red carpet!) and getting very, very excited!

Two buckets of pop-corn and 8 liters of diet poop later, we had enjoyed the last movie. It was fabulous, managing to bring in both laughs and tears. By now, I am so used that the movies are getting further and further away from the books, that i did not spend time working myself up over it! (I was pretty upset after watching the Goblet of Fire...) ;-)
The scene showing Snape's memories in the Pensive was very powerful, I think. This is when you could really hear people starting to sniffle in the audience.

Anyway, I had a fantastic day and I was a bit surprised that I was really productive at work the day after (or later that day I guess is a more correct statement - I got home from the movies at 2.30 in the morning...).

So, if you are not a HP fan, no worries, there will be a stitchy post later this weekend. For you HP fans out there - I hope that you'll have a great time enjoying the movie, unless you already did so!

Happy Movie Going!