Saturday, July 21, 2007

Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows (No Spoilers - I Haven't Read It)

Getting our reserved book was a little more complicated than I had realized it would be. I have gone to a couple of midnight Harry Potter parties at Barnes & Noble over the years, but not to the last one, so I did not know how they were doing it now.

Fortunately, we happened to go to Barnes & Noble on Thursday night to look around. There were several people camped out in front already. With some apprehension, I asked them if that was going to be necessary. They explained that people were supposed to come to the store Friday morning at 9am and line up to get a ticket that would say what their place in line was to get their reserved book at midnight. They were camping out because they wanted the first tickets - ah. The Lone Star Girl, of course, immediately wanted to camp out, too, but I nixed that idea. I did take her over there at 8:30 the next morning with drive-through breakfasts. The line was already around the building. We did pretty well, though, as our ticket was a pink group C ticket. Apparently, pink tickets would be called alphabetically in groups A-Z, then some other color A-Z, then the folks without reserved copies with white tickets A-Z, if books were left for them. So a pink C ticket seemed pretty good.

We returned at 8pm for the festivities, although the Lone Star Girl acted too cool for most of the activities, opting mostly to just read. It was fun to see all the kids in their costumes, though. As midnight approached, they started announcing that pink groups A & B should line up, etc. The crowding was pretty intense and I had the Lone Star Girl hold on to me so we wouldn't get separated. There was a countdown until midnight like on New Year's Eve and lots of cheering. The actual selling was very organized and, although I had heard there were fifty people in each letter group, we were out of there by 12:15. I am letting the Lone Star Girl read it first, loving mother that I am.

It is still cool to see that kind of frenzy about a book.

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