![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thebratqueen(No spoilers, promise)
So as of 12:06am last night I had my copy. Numbered tickets are definitely the way to go.
The bookstore had a fairly big crowd. Just enough to skitter close to the edge of being insane without totally going over until around, say, 11:50.
I got there at around a quarter to 11 and bummed around a bit. My hope of sitting down with fic and a cup of tea was thwarted by all the very stressed looking parents who had more than beaten me to it. I decided to let them have the cafe and instead wandered around the store. It was too noisy to actually read anything for content so instead I picked up random books that seemed interesting and flipped through them. For those who care I'd say Knitting for Dummies is not worth anyone's investment as for some odd reason they thought that actually showing pictures of every step was wholly unnecessary and instead they mostly describe stuff and show you pictures of every second or third step. I think if I'm ever going to learn knitting I'll have to bug one of my friends to teach me.
For all the crowd, though, I was glad to have done it. It was fun watching the kids in costume, all of them eagerly correcting the pronunciations of names and spells that the guy doing the trivia contest messed up. I was also bemused by the complete randomness of the demographics. Yeah you had a lot of parents and little kids, and teenagers who you could tell by their scarves and costumes were either well entrenched in geekiness or definitely headed their way to a fanfic LJ/listserv/RPG near you, but you also had some very mundane-looking, no-kids-apparent adults even older than I was hopping up and down with barely contained eagerness and, my favorite, a group of boys who could have very easily been members of Gunn's gang (complete with wardrobe), hanging around the humor section in that classic "we're just chillin'" pose that boys like them are so good at maintaining, while earnestly debating whether or not Malfoy was the shit yo.
Once midnight got closer everyone started to move, sheep-like, towards the front. That one amused me as well b/c at that point I was able to ignore the crowd enough to read the fic I brought with me and since I was #7 I was actually supposed to hang out near the front, but not everyone else was so lucky so every so often I amused myself by noting how many of the grownups were pretending to really be that interested in the "We can't pay people to take these books off our hands" collection that was the only thing near the cash register.
At about five to midnight they finally started organizing things into a line, and I really think they should have stuck to their original plan of doing that at 11:30 because those with bigger numbers did not catch the clue that they needed to stay the hell out of the way. But for the most part other than the near deafening feeling of stress that was filling the building everyone behaved themselves. Mind you I don't know if this persisted until the end of the night, but everyone who was up front was pretty relaxed and I think all of us were fine to go in whatever order we'd lined up in even though the cashiers decided to call out numbers.
At about one minute to go I briefly debated seeing how much money I could get for my ticket but then decided not to bother.
And then, as I say, at 12:06 I had my copy in hand. I had another moment of being glad that I did this at a midnight party because a group of boys averaging about age 10 had decided to station themselves by the door and as those of us who got our books passed by on the way out they would go "You got your book! YAY!!" and whoop and clap which I actually thought was pretty cute.
I stopped off to get a snack on the way home, arrived back at my place at around 12:30, read until 5:30, gave in to sleep because I was starting to lose my ability to fully appreciate what I was reading, woke up around 11:30, had breakfast and got the crockpot going and then read more or less uninterrupted until 6. My cats spent the entire time keeping me company either on my stomach or by my shoulders as I lay down on the couch, and with the rain going outside and the smell of chicken coming from the crockpot I've got to say all in all there are worse ways to spend a day off.
I'll do my comments about the book itself in another, cut-tagged post, but since this one is public and for all to see let me just say that with one thing and another I... I give in. Clearly fate and the sorting hat have spoken. I am Gryffindor. I will stand beside my BFF and wave our shared house colors proudly.
Though this isn't going to stop me from trying to spend extra time with Snape. Fair warning.
Ahem.
So as of 12:06am last night I had my copy. Numbered tickets are definitely the way to go.
The bookstore had a fairly big crowd. Just enough to skitter close to the edge of being insane without totally going over until around, say, 11:50.
I got there at around a quarter to 11 and bummed around a bit. My hope of sitting down with fic and a cup of tea was thwarted by all the very stressed looking parents who had more than beaten me to it. I decided to let them have the cafe and instead wandered around the store. It was too noisy to actually read anything for content so instead I picked up random books that seemed interesting and flipped through them. For those who care I'd say Knitting for Dummies is not worth anyone's investment as for some odd reason they thought that actually showing pictures of every step was wholly unnecessary and instead they mostly describe stuff and show you pictures of every second or third step. I think if I'm ever going to learn knitting I'll have to bug one of my friends to teach me.
For all the crowd, though, I was glad to have done it. It was fun watching the kids in costume, all of them eagerly correcting the pronunciations of names and spells that the guy doing the trivia contest messed up. I was also bemused by the complete randomness of the demographics. Yeah you had a lot of parents and little kids, and teenagers who you could tell by their scarves and costumes were either well entrenched in geekiness or definitely headed their way to a fanfic LJ/listserv/RPG near you, but you also had some very mundane-looking, no-kids-apparent adults even older than I was hopping up and down with barely contained eagerness and, my favorite, a group of boys who could have very easily been members of Gunn's gang (complete with wardrobe), hanging around the humor section in that classic "we're just chillin'" pose that boys like them are so good at maintaining, while earnestly debating whether or not Malfoy was the shit yo.
Once midnight got closer everyone started to move, sheep-like, towards the front. That one amused me as well b/c at that point I was able to ignore the crowd enough to read the fic I brought with me and since I was #7 I was actually supposed to hang out near the front, but not everyone else was so lucky so every so often I amused myself by noting how many of the grownups were pretending to really be that interested in the "We can't pay people to take these books off our hands" collection that was the only thing near the cash register.
At about five to midnight they finally started organizing things into a line, and I really think they should have stuck to their original plan of doing that at 11:30 because those with bigger numbers did not catch the clue that they needed to stay the hell out of the way. But for the most part other than the near deafening feeling of stress that was filling the building everyone behaved themselves. Mind you I don't know if this persisted until the end of the night, but everyone who was up front was pretty relaxed and I think all of us were fine to go in whatever order we'd lined up in even though the cashiers decided to call out numbers.
At about one minute to go I briefly debated seeing how much money I could get for my ticket but then decided not to bother.
And then, as I say, at 12:06 I had my copy in hand. I had another moment of being glad that I did this at a midnight party because a group of boys averaging about age 10 had decided to station themselves by the door and as those of us who got our books passed by on the way out they would go "You got your book! YAY!!" and whoop and clap which I actually thought was pretty cute.
I stopped off to get a snack on the way home, arrived back at my place at around 12:30, read until 5:30, gave in to sleep because I was starting to lose my ability to fully appreciate what I was reading, woke up around 11:30, had breakfast and got the crockpot going and then read more or less uninterrupted until 6. My cats spent the entire time keeping me company either on my stomach or by my shoulders as I lay down on the couch, and with the rain going outside and the smell of chicken coming from the crockpot I've got to say all in all there are worse ways to spend a day off.
I'll do my comments about the book itself in another, cut-tagged post, but since this one is public and for all to see let me just say that with one thing and another I... I give in. Clearly fate and the sorting hat have spoken. I am Gryffindor. I will stand beside my BFF and wave our shared house colors proudly.
Though this isn't going to stop me from trying to spend extra time with Snape. Fair warning.
Ahem.
