So I haven't blogged in a while - I've been busy finishing up my internship and getting ready to head back to Bloomington. But I thought I'd go ahead and post my final internship journal entry, covering Allen County Public Library's big Potter Party last Friday. I wrote this entry this past Saturday afternoon, right after the party:
It’s OVER! I feel exhausted, relieved…and kind of depressed, too, kind of like that post-Christmas letdown feeling. It’s sad to know that it’s all over – but what an event it was! Last night, the library was completely transformed into Diagon Alley and Hogwarts, and absolutely swarming with witches, wizards, trolls, house-elves, owls, and various other magical creatures. It was impossible to get an exact count of the number of people who came, but from what I heard, we’re estimating that several thousand walked through our doors last night, and I definitely believe it – that place was hopping.
I showed up about three hours before the party started to help with last-minute setting up. Our wand shop was set up at the General Reference desk, and we had fun transforming it. We had cardboard sheets made to look like stone castle walls that we put up around the computers and other modern equipment, covered the whole desk in floaty, sparkly purple fabric, and displayed our wands everywhere. It looked pretty nice when we were all done, especially with the lights dimmed.
We were located right next to Honeyduke’s Sweet Shoppe and the “Restricted Section” – a maze that was set up in the Reader’s Services stacks. Across from us was the fortune-telling tent and the “Room of Requirement” – a general resting area for people who got worn out from partying. There was also a “Wizarding Wear” shop with Harry Potter t-shirts to buy, a “Hattery” with various kooky-looking witch and wizard hats on display, along with its main attraction, the Sorting Hat. Next to the hattery, we had a local independent bookstore on hand to sell copies of the book at “Flourish and Blott’s Booksellers”. We also had several craft stations, where you could make a Weasley clock, design owl post letters, and paint Harry Potter-related stained glass, a Wizarding Duel room where people could test their Harry Potter trivia knowledge, a couple of photo ops with the Hogwarts Head Table (and Dumbledore) and the flying Ford Anglia, and a Potions class. Upstairs, we had the Astronomy Tower, with Science Central setting up their SkyLab dome. And finally, outside we had a performance by the “wizarding” band Ballroom Roustabouts, Quaffle practice hoops, and an Acromantula web for kids to climb on. Whew! It was incredible, the amount of time, effort, and organization (also money) that went into this one night.
From the moment the doors were opened, we were swarmed at Ollivander’s Wands. It was a lot of fun working there, though, because we got to act all mystical and choose wands for each patron. We’d made the wands to match each House color from the books, and while some people had very definite ideas or wanted a wand to match the House they’d been “Sorted” into by our Sorting Hat, we could play with it some. I took particular delight in insisting that the most ornery-looking kids were “obviously Slytherins”! Speaking of which, my coworker Kirsten and I took a break to go get Sorted ourselves, and yep – we both ended up in Slytherin. Muahahaha!
At one point we were so busy that our line was starting to get tangled with the line for the Restricted Section maze, so I got sent out to keep things straight and sort of be a crier attracting people to our shop. It was fun milling with the crowd and exclaiming over everyone’s costumes, but I almost completely lost my voice within an hour. I’m still pretty hoarse today. We did have some great costumes. First there were the library staff members who were playing various witches and wizards from the book. We had Dumbledore, McGonagall, Gilderoy Lockhart, Hagrid, Snape, Mad-Eye Moody, Moaning Myrtle, and, of course, Harry Potter. Their costumes were all incredible, and they did a great job of staying in character while posing for pictures and signing autographs – our Snape was so good that he was actually upsetting a few younger children and had to be told to tone it down a bit.
Other great costumes I spotted: Several good Luna Lovegoods and Professor Trelawneys, a hideously perfect Professor Umbridge, several babies dressed as owls and house-elves, lots of Rons and Harrys and Hermiones, and one very creative girl who dressed as the Fat Lady portrait from Gryffindor’s entrance.
Towards the end of the evening we did a “crystal ball drop” from the second floor into the Great Hall, which consisted of thousands of little silver balloons, each with a fortune inside. The noise was incredible, as everyone ran around stomping balloons to get their fortunes. Shortly after that we held our drawing to see who was going to be able to check out one of our 250 copies of the book. After that, it was just a matter of counting down the time until midnight. I had already reserved a copy for myself over at the booksellers, so I was able to watch the frenzy as everyone rushed to get their own copies. I noticed several people who started reading almost immediately – and not a few who turned straight to the back of the book to find out the end. Cheaters!
After midnight, when everyone got their books, the party died down pretty quickly. I stuck around for another hour or so to help get the clean-up started, but Mari sent me home a little earlier than some, since I’m not actually getting paid for any of this! Believe it or not, I didn’t start reading the book myself last night – I was exhausted, so I went straight to bed. I haven’t started it yet, in fact. I think as soon as I finish this journal entry I’m going to get going on it. I’ll try to do one more journal entry a bit later, to sum up my feelings about the internship as a whole. For now – I’ve got reading to do!
Check this out - so fun. The idea is to go through book collections, both public and private, pull out books, and arrange them so the titles can be read in order. There are some great ones:
(Found through Bookshelves of Doom)
From xkcd:
Just looking at stick figures damaging a book like that makes me shudder. And don't even get me started on the nasty things people do to paperbacks.
I love these. If only I'd discovered them before I decided to be an English major - it would have saved me so much time!
My favorites:
The Collected Works of Jane Austen
If On a Winter's Night a Traveler
Dante's Inferno
Ethan Frome
So far in the last two months I have:
- Finished my first year of grad school - halfway to my MLS degree!
- Worked at an internship that I love and is hopefully a huge step towards a great job I'll love in the future
- Lost 15 pounds
- Got a really cute new haircut
- Got new soft contact lenses.
The conclusion, my friends? I am MADE OF AWESOME. Now I just need to lose 25 more pounds and I'm pretty sure I'll be the sexiest librarian ever.
Rhapsody in Blue – Gershwin
A Little Bit More – Jamie Lidell
Hard Time Killing Floor Blues – Chris Thomas King
The Two Sides of Monsieur Valentine – Spoon
If You Find Yourself Caught in Love – Belle and Sebastian
Be Gone – British Sea Power
Piano Sonata no. 14 in C-Sharp Minor (Moonlight Sonata) – Beethoven
Falling and Laughing – Orange Juice
Your Cover’s Blown – Belle and Sebastian
Skin Is, My – Andrew Bird
Rated-R Movie – Fine
Norwegian Wood – The Beatles
Lloyd, I’m Ready to be Heartbroken – Camera Obscura
Cybele’s Reverie – Stereolab
Off the Record – My Morning Jacket
We Could Walk Together - The Clientele
How to Disappear Completely – Radiohead
Let’s Save Tony Orlando’s House – Yo La Tengo
Marian the Librarian – from The Music Man
Today at the library one of the teens came running up to us at the desk yelling, "There's something on fire outside!" Of course we all immediately ran for the windows, where we saw several bushes next to the English Lutheran church's parking lot up in flames, with lots of smoke billowing out over downtown. At first it didn't seem like anyone else had even noticed, so Jennifer got on the phone and tried calling the library's security and the office for the church to get ahold of people. Finally a few security guys from the library ran out with fire extinguishers, but they couldn't get it out, and eventually the fire truck had to come out. Whew! We were all worried that the fire was going to jump from the bushes to a nearby tree, or that the car parked right next to the fire would be damaged. Luckily things were under control pretty quickly after the fire department arrived, although the bushes looked pretty sad. It looks like it was probably caused by a cigarette that someone threw out without making sure it wasn't still burning. I'm glad it turned out to be a relatively minor thing and easily handled, but it was still by far the most exciting thing that happened in our day!
I've been going through Mother Reader's list of all of the Book Challenge participants this year, taking notes on what I should read next - people have read lots of good stuff, it looks like. The most frustrating thing is all of the people who have read and reviewed advance copies of books that aren't out until later this summer or fall - some of them sound really intriguing and I kept writing them down only to discover I can't read them yet! I miss the days when I was working at Mitchell Books and could carry home armloads of ARCs to look over.
Well, officially I'm not done until 7:00 a.m. tomorrow morning, but I'm tired and I've got a headache from hell, so I seriously doubt I'll be getting any more reading in before then. I've finished two more books since my last post, but I'm too tired and yucky feeling right now to do full reviews, so I'll just say a few words about each:
The Goose Girl, by Shannon Hale -
I really liked this one. I've always loved fairy tale retellings, ever since I read Robin McKinley's Beauty years ago, and this was a good one. Hale really creates a detailed and believable world, the characters are fun, and there's a nice little romance as well. It looks like there are two sequels following some of the minor characters from this book, so I'll have to check those out as well.
Hattie Big Sky, by Kirby Larson -
I don't know if it was just that this was the last book of the marathon I read and I was starting to wind down, or what, but I had some trouble getting into this one initially. Maybe because it's the only historical fiction of the bunch and so I had to switch gears a bit. One thing that I appreciated was that in the end, our plucky heroine trying to hold down a Montana claim all by herself does NOT succeed - pretty unusual in children's fiction, maybe, but very realistic, considering the odds against her. So, yeah. My impressions of the book as a whole are kind of foggy right now, I think, but I did end up liking it pretty well, although sometimes it felt a bit too messagey.
So that's that, then! Time to wrap things up. Here are the totals for my weekend reading experience:
Books read: 6
Pages read: 1856
Time spent reading: About 20 hours or so
I didn't get as much reading done as I would have liked, since other events came up, but overall it was a fun experience and I'm glad I did it. Right now, though, I just want to get rid of this headache and go to bed and sleep for twelve hours.