We went to the coffee shop Saturday morning and the perky young woman who works there asked us when we got to the front of the (very short) line, "Do you guys ever fight?" We must have looked confused because she said that every time she sees us, which is just about every day, we look so happy and relaxed together. Brad said that whenever I get mad at him he thinks it's funny and just laughs, which almost always makes me laugh, too. It's nice to be part of a relationship that is in such a happy place that even strangers notice.
After we had our drinks in our hands (grande skinny latte for me, Denali-size soy latte for Brad), we went over to the bookstore to see whether they had survived their midnight Harry Potter party and to redeem myself for our visit the previous day when I had done one of those classic "customers are crazy" activities: "I'm looking for a book. I don't remember the author, or the name, but it has a blue cover." Actually, I thought the name was 59th Parallel and is about the sinking of a fishing boat in the Bering Sea. The nice people who work at the Homer Bookstore duly looked on their computer search for 59 and 59th and 59th parallel and didn't find anything, so we bought a couple of other books and went home. I looked in my Amazon account info since I had sent the book I wanted to my Mom at the beginning of June, and there it was. 58 Degrees North So close, and yet so unsearchable. And it does indeed have a blue cover, dammit. It was in stock, so we bought it, and of course bought the new Harry Potter and then realized that we hadn't read the previous one yet, so bought that, too.
I read Book 5: The Order of the Phoenix on Saturday (which also has a blue cover), and immediately started Book 6: The Half-Blood Prince. I took Brad to the airport on Sunday morning for his extra-long commute to Palo Alto and finished Book 6 in the afternoon. It's certainly a sad tale, and both books are thoroughly engrossing. It was great to read two of them in a row and be completely absorbed in the story. I'm not a huge science fiction / fantasy reader, but loved the Chronicles of Narnia when I read them in 6th grade, and the first three Sword of Shannara books which I read around the same time. Oh, and of course The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings series. I also read Dune and Dune Messiah, which made a big impression on me (esp. Fear is the mind killer, political power of religion), at least to the extent I could understand them then, and then didn't really read any other science fiction or fantasy until The Mists of Avalon in college. Except for Neuromancer. And maybe a couple of other things. I think the Potter books are certainly worthy of being in the company of these other great fantasy books, and I look forward to Book 7.
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