This post doesn’t have any spoilers of the last book. Just photos and me blathering. Just FYI.

This is quite a bit after, but I suck at getting pictures off the camera, so there you go.

We had a great time. It was a time filled with nervous energy. I’m watching a movie as I write this, and a great line from it describes how we were feeling. “You know how you feel when you’re holding a cup of hot coffee and you feel a sneeze coming on.. It’s a bit like that.”

It was a LOT like that.. In the beginning, it was just kind of fun, and boring. Lots of people. Some kids, running around having fun at all the things the bookstore had set up.

the picture taking/frame making station.

hat making station

cute-slash-dumb signs posted all over the store

lots of people dressed up. Some were lame. There was more than one teenage girl that just fell under “slutty schoolgirl” rather than anything harry potter. But there were some good ones.

Moaning Myrtle (bookstore employee)

Delores Umbridge (bookstore employee)

and my absolute favorite – Rita Skeeter. She was DEAD ON. This picture doesn’t do her justice.

and then random sort of dressing up

Everything was fine… kind of boring, even, for a while. We got there at around 10:30pm, and by 10:45 we were bored and picked out magazines and settled in a corner to wait. Like many others.

I couldn’t really focus on my magazine though. I made James play some Harry Potter related games, like naming spells back and forth to see who knew the most (I did, yay for petrificus totalus!) and also Hogwarts students (he did, damn that little colin creevey).

Probably around 11:30 they started lining us up. Then the realization that it was all happening kicked in and we started getting excited.

Then they started carting out the books and the whole store cheered and whooped and freaked out and then it was really exciting.

Then we had to wait.

this is the book that was on the on the bookshelf right next to me.

When we finally got to the register at 12:21…

.. and bought our books from this nice lady (it’s blurry, but that’s the girl who sold us our books! hurrah!)

I was so excited and nervous that I forgot to also purchase the magazines I had been clutching for the past hour (but don’t worry, I went back 2 days later and paid for them.)

You know, we’ve never gone to a midnight party before. We were quite content to let amazon deliver, or just go pick up the books the next day ourselves with little fuss and bother.

But this was the last book. There won’t be anymore. I kind of wanted to go because.. and this is really cheesy, so just cringe and go with it.. because I wanted to be part of history. Now, I know we’re not talking about Shakespeare or anything, but this was the LAST BOOK! And I think they’re going to be around for a good long time. Never again will we be in that moment of not knowing how it all turns out. Never again will we roll our eyes at all the hype surrounding the latest harry potter book. This was IT.

Why not go? Why not go and get excited and jump up and down and just get all pruney with the cheesiness and the HISTORY (ha ha) of it all? We won’t have another chance, so if we want to get goofy and all over excited like a 3 year old who didn’t nap, well, THIS IS IT!

So we did!

I’m glad we went. It was FUN.

And I’ll be able to (gag, barf) show my grandchildren the pictures.

episode 2 tomorrow – me blathering