Man, if there's ever anything to make you feel like a Muggle, it's waking up the morning of September 2nd, NOT in your house dormitory... le sigh.... One year, I really really really want to be in London on September 1st and take a picture like right before 11:00 at King's Cross at Platform 9 3/4! I know there's probably lots of people that do that every year... I just want to be one of those people!
So, this past week has been very hectic because we had this whole Hurricane Isaac thing going on. I want to assure all of y'all that my family and I are all just fine. My brother got some water in his house, and they had to be boated out of their neighborhood that's about 30 minutes outside of New Orleans, and boy, do I wish he would've had the Trace on him then! There were about five hours where we had NO CLUE where my brother and my oldest nephew were, which was scary, but it's all good. Phones just were not working right because everybody was having the same issues apparently. On the side of good news, we learned that the Impervius charm that the Corps of Engineers put around the New Orleans area works! Which means most of the city came off relatively unscathed, just your usual downed trees and power lines.... Makes me wonder, if in HBP they suspected giants were involved in a "freak hurricane".... were they perhaps involved here?? Although there are NO mountains anywhere near by... Do you think maybe there are swamp giants somewhere?? Curious... very curious... Downside, we're going on the fifth day of no power at my house... I've been trying Lumos.... totally has not worked... Now, a block over, at my family's photography studio, we have power... so yeah, that's pretty much where we've been living. I'm gonna need a house-elf to do a cleaning once the power comes back on. The house is just hot and smells really musty right now.
I want to tell y'all about an awesome happening yesterday that just made me very very happy! So I was doing my normal check of the news yesterday..... and by news I mean, checking Facebook, and checking for new posts in Nerdfighteria, on the Hogwarts Professor blog, and on the Harry Potter Alliance blog.... side note: the HPA is currently doing and awesome campaign called Equality FTW... if you have not donated to it yet, it's an awesome campaign... they're planning on building another Imagine Better Library. It is very very sad, but lots and lots of children do not have access to books. It seems to typical for all of our very modern lives that we can just order online or download straight to our ereaders tons of books wherever and whenever we want, but lots of people don't have that option, globally and here in the US. It's hard to claim that everyone has equal access to education when so many don't have access to the basic tools of education: BOOKS!! And hey, when the population as a whole is progressively smarter, everyone benefits! But I digress....
ANYWAY... so I checked the HP Alliance blog, and there was a great post that had a link to the video of JKR's 2008 Harvard Commencement Address from in which she used the phrase "Imagine Better" that has become a big statement of the HP Alliance. So you know, can't help but watch it... well, a minute or so after I turned it on... I was watching it on the computer in my dad's office, which has a second large monitor hooked up so that clients can view their images in sales... it was on and my dad and my husband walked in. Now, my husband has read the books several times, so he's got his official magic card even if he isn't as massive of a fan as I am, but my Dad is definitely a Muggle. He's never read the books, and has maybe seen the first movie like twice... They were just coming in to eat some donuts (there's a conference table in my dad's office that has now morphed into our dinner table this past week), and I paused it, and Dad was like, "Oh, what's this?" And I was like "It's JK Rowling's commencement address to Harvard." And he was like, "Well, you can but it back on." And so he sat down and watched the speech. This was probably the first time he had ever really seen video of Jo and heard her speak so I was very excited... but I totally played it cool... well, he sat there entranced for the whole speech. I couldn't see his face... he was facing the second monitor, but he didn't turn and start a conversation with my husband and go on eating, which he would've done if he was bored. And after it was over, he went, "Wow... that was AWESOME! That's something good just to watch over and over again!" And I was just very smugly giddy and was like "Yup... she's kind of amazing!" Later on, I was talking to my husband and was like "Dad really seemed to like Jo's speech this morning!" and Roch (my husband) says, "Bey... he was CRYING." I was like "REALLY??" and that just made me ecstatic! You know, it's one thing for us in the Potterverse to be moved to tears when Jo speaks. I mean, we probably would tear up merely getting a glance of her on TV! But for her to move my Dad to tears, when he hasn't even really gotten into the true power of her words, is just wonderful! And it gave me great hope that eventually, he could lose his Muggle status yet! :-)
