I got back from Vancouver this morning. I flew home via San Francisco. I was supposed to have a 70-minute window between landing in SF and taking off for Newark, but the first flight took off an hour late. Fortunately, 17 passengers were making that transfer (or 1 out of 8 passengers! wow), so they held the Newark plane at the gate for us, and when the first flight landed, the flight attendant asked all the passengers to let the Newark-bound passengers off the plane first. That was kinda cool.
Number of copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows spotted:
– 2 being read by children at the gate at Vancouver.
– 1 being read by a young woman sitting two seats away from me on the first flight.
– 4 being read by people as I walked down the aisle of the second plane to get to my seat in the back.
And oh yeah, the copy that Matt started and finished yesterday.
You lucky duck. I ordered my Potter from amazon.com, but instead of the book the post-owl delivered a little pink form that said I had to pick it up at the post office after 8:00 on Monday morning. Since I had it shipped to my parents’ house, and the post office is open only while I’m at work, I won’t have the book until next Saturday.
I phoned the post office this morning. It took half an hour to get through. The supervisor told me that the local postmaster issued an edict that the Harry Potter books must be handed to the recipient to prevent theft! So anyone who wasn’t home when the postman arrived on Saturday got a nice pink form instead of the book.
Yes, that was surely a well-intentioned “security” measure. But like most “security measures” today, it merely pissed off a lot of people and diminished the value of the delivered item with the delay.
I read my copy by Sunday — The ending is…..OK just kidding!
I got my copy at 10:30 a.m. Saturday (Jeff said it was a cute UPS guy), read until 5:00 (breaking only to shower and get dressed), at which point we went downtown for dinner and to a show (I did at least leave my copy at home during that period, though we saw several people reading their copies at the theater before the curtain came up). We got home at 10:30 p.m. and I finished it a little under an hour later.