Eliott - A dream involving Harry Potter, Jen, and Bucky

I had the most messed up dream last night, and it involved both Jen and Harry Potter... and Bucky. Since this blog has temporarily taken on a slight Harry Potter theme, I thought I might share my dream.

I run to the casino (located in a St Laurent synagogue) in a frantic hurry. Something is wrong. when I get there, Jen is very distraught and frightened. I look at her slot machine, and see that there is a lot of money in the winnings tray, consisting entirely of tokens from a video game arcade. I also notice a few papers, that I know are of the utmost importance for some reason. In a hurry, I grab a money bag out of nowhere, and stuff all the tokens in there, hiding the papers in between the tokens.

Suddenly, 3 death eaters enter the casino, and see these papers (they magically rose to the top of the money bag) that they had been looking for. I don't remember exactly what happens next, but I think I apparate (or run away like a sissy) to my grandfather's old apartment. Worried, I call Jen, asking if she's ok. She sounds fine. I then notice Bucky, wandering around outside the apartment building. He's been shaved almost to the skin. In retrospect, it looked pretty hilarious, but in my dream, it was frightening.

I start talking to Bucky, who is running around meowing, but can't pick him up because I'm holding my cell phone. Jen hears me talking to Bucky, and tells me that there's no reason for me to be talking to Bucky, because he's not with her at the moment. I then explain to her that Bucky is right near me.

End of dream. And no, I wasn't doing crack.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Before I begin with my thoughts on the final Harry Potter book, I thought some of you might want to hear about a nice wipe-out that I had yesterday. At one of our long-term grids, there is a creek that needs to be crossed. I did not cross at my usual place. I had managed to get all the way across with no difficulty, but on the last rock, which was wet, I slipped and fell on my knee. I tried to balance myself to pull myself up, and I managed to fall sideways into the creek. Half of me was soaking, while the other half was dry. The water wasn’t too cold and was actually rather refreshing after the exertion of setting a grid and a half of traps. I got up with my dripping bag of seeds and set the trap nearby. When I saw a bewildered Nikhil soon after, I started giggling hysterically. Afterwards I realized that I did in fact hurt myself; I scraped myself on the arm and the knee, pulling a small muscle in my forearm and bruising my knee. My biggest injury is the knee, which is swollen; I will be limping for a few days. Someone always seems to get injured when there are only two people to do all the work (Crisia is with Yeen Ten in Kootenay).

Now for some Harry Potter. I will indicate where you should stop in order not to read any spoilers about the book. Edith and I had pre-ordered our books at an independent bookstore in Canmore. Their release party began at 10:30pm on the 20^th. After searching for a while for some coffee (everything closes before 10pm in Canmore), as both of us had long days (Edith had driven in to Canmore earlier in the day, which is about an hour and a half from Kootenay, and had to go back to do some work before driving in again, and I had gone on a 3-4 hour hike up a mountain just prior to leaving for Canmore), we made our way to the bookstore, which was already packed. The small bookstore had over 200 pre-orders.

To keep people occupied, they had a quiz/scavenger hunt with questions for kids and adults. We answered both, and they were, for the most part, rather difficult. They also had free punch, chocolate frogs, and candy. Half the people there were dressed up in some kind of costume. My favourites were Draco Malfoy, a very little Harry Potter, and a Hagrid, complete with fur coat (It was hot, so I considered that person to be very dedicated). There was a good mixture of age groups, with 8 year olds and their parents, teenagers, people my age, and adults who were there for themselves.

We counted down to 12:01am, and then went to separate tables where books were given out alphabetically. I had my book (and Yeen Ten’s) in my hands by 12:05am. I was very excited and couldn’t wait to go back to the trailer to read. At the trailer, I stayed up reading until around 4:30am. I woke up again at 8am to continue. I was reading pretty much the entire day with small breaks to do a little bit of essential work. I was done the book by 5pm.

I’m a little sad that I didn’t get to savour it a bit, and after Tracy is done with my book, I think that’s what I’m going to do. I was too anxious to find out what happens before anything was spoiled for me. On that note, anything below this paragraph will contain SPOILERS for anyone who has read the books.

To begin, I was very satisfied with the ending of this series. It flowed very quickly even though it was complex, and it was not bogged down by the need to explain or learn anything basic, which was common but necessary in the previous books. I felt vindicated that my major predictions were indeed correct: Harry was a Horcrux, and Snape is good and was in love with Lily Potter.

A lot of people died in this book, the most poignant of which for me were Dobby, Tonks and Lupin, Fred, and Snape. I think the chapter in which everything is revealed about Snape was my favourite. If I was not so dazed from reading the entire day, I think I would have been weeping while reading the last 100 pages or so. The only times where I actually felt my self tearing up a slight little bit were when Harry was digging the grave for Dobby and at the very end, where you see all the major characters 19 years later. I guess it was the Happily Ever After factor that got to me and that I was finally coming to the realization, that, yes, it was finally over; there will never be another book to wait eagerly with anticipation for, in line with hundreds of people anxiously awaiting the same thing. This was it. This was the end.

I would give more thought here to some of the major ideas in the series that make it so great, but I would definitely need to reread this last book at a more leisurely pace and possibly the entire series again in order to do so adequately. For now I must simply say thank you to J.K. Rowling for creating this world and these characters and for finally giving us the conclusion that has been 10 years in the making.

Calgary Stampede

Last Saturday, Nikhil, Tracy, Kurt, and I went to the Calgary Stampede. When we finally got there (we left around 2 hours after when we had intended to leave), we started out the day with some lemonade and some giant corn dogs. I don’t think they sell anything there that is not deep fried. Since it was so hot and sunny, we stuck to the livestock exhibitions at the beginning, which were indoors. We perused some of the Western wear booths to see if I could find Eliott a decent and reasonably priced cowboy hat. We couldn’t. We saw the Native American tipis and walked though the carnival rides and games.

It cost between $5 and $6 to go on a ride, so we only did one: the log ride. As a regular frequenter of La Pitoune at La Ronde, which this ride was similar to, I am well aware that the goal of this ride was to get wet and that it wouldn’t be the ride that would do it; I have also become very adept at splashing. The minute we got on, I soaked my poor unsuspecting friends behind me. They retaliated of course, and we were all dripping at the end. It ended up being me and Kurt in the front against Tracy and Nikhil in the back. All of our socks were still damp by the time we got home, which was 10 hours later.

After grabbing some more unhealthy food for supper, we walked over to the Saddledome for The Tragically Hip concert. Our tickets for this show came with admission to the Stampede. I don’t really know The Hip that well, but I do know all the stuff that plays on the radio. Nikhil is a huge fan, so when he found out they were coming, we had to go. The concert was very good. The sound was great, and the lead singer had a lot of energy. I think I could really get into some of their music. I will be ripping Nikhil’s c.d.’s shortly.

After the concert, we were supposed to pick Crisia up at the Greyhound station, as she was returning from Saskatchewan. She texted me during the concert to tell me that her bus had broken down an hour and a half out of Calgary. We decided to hang around the Stampede a bit, so between the four of us we got mini-donuts, popcorn, candy apples, and snow-cones. I almost caved and spent $5 on a spray gun game, so that I could win Eliott a ukulele; I finally decided that $5 for one chance in 11 was too much. Maybe I’ll get him one for Hanukkah.

After a rather long time, Crisia called us and told us that the bus still hadn’t arrived, so maybe we should go home, and she’d sleep at the bus station. We couldn’t let her sleep there, so we told her we’d come to get her. However, on the way to the car on the LRT, we found out that the bus finally came, so we went to the station (after Tim Horton’s and a lot of driving around and determining that Calgary is in fact rather sketchy) to wait for her. We got home around 3 am. I still had to water my mice when I got back, All in all, it was a very fun but long day.

Pictures are available here.

P.S. I finished Harry Potter yesterday. I will post soon with my thoughts on finishing the book.

Eliott - Back home from Kananaskis

Jen asked me to make a post as a contributing writer, so here I am. Forgive me for being so late to write this post. I won't make it too long, since Jen has already told you about much of our trip. I guess I'll focus on Kananskis.

After spending a couple of days in Calgary, including a night at the Roger Waters concert, I made my way to Kananaskis with Jen (who, as you know, had come to Calgary to surprise me the day before I meant to drive down). Kananaskis is absolutely beautiful. If you haven't looked at Jen's pictures, take a look.

The trailer that Jen is staying in is really more of a small home. It's got three bedrooms, a small kitchen, and a TV room. With only 3 people staying there most of the time, I would imagine that it rarely feels crowded, and everybody has their space. Outside of the trailer, Jen even has an office. How come she gets an office and I don't?!

Although Jen was a little busy with her mice while I was there, I had a lot of fun. It was great to see what Jen has been doing all summer. While I was there, Jen and I went out to the mountains a few times in the morning to check her traps for mice. I also helped her with some stuff in her lab.

The people that Jen is with in Kananaskis are very cool too. With all of them living together for 4 months straight, Jen really lucked out by being with some awesome people. We had lots of fun playing some games, going out to a pub, and driving down to Drumheller to see the Royal Tyrell (dinosaur) museum.

After a few days in Kananaskis, a day in Banff, and a day in Canmore, Jen and I said goodbye to her Kananaskis friends, and went back to Calgary to spend a couple more days with my aunt+uncle+cousin before heading out to Vancouver.

In Vancouver, we stayed at Jeremy's place. Vancouver is a really beautiful city, second only to Montreal in terms of nicest Canadian cities as far as I'm concerned. One thing I noticed though, is that there are lots and lots of crazy people in Vancouver; way more than in Montreal. After a few days in Vancouver we headed to Victoria for a couple of days, then came back to Vancouver for the end of our
vacation.

If you want to take a look at some more picture of our trip, look here.

Oh, and before I go, here are my Harry Potter predictions. They happen to be similar to Jen's:

• Neville, not Harry, is the chosen one (or, if not, he plays a very important role in the battle against Voldemort)


• Harry gets back together with Ginny, and they both survive


• Snape is a good guy. He killed Dumbledore because he made an unbreakable vow to kill Dumbledore if Malfoy could not


• Harry is definitely a Horcrux


• Malfoy dies


• Hagrid, Fred, George, and Hermione die


• Percy stops being a git


• McGonagall will be important (and Hogwarts will stay open)


• Voldermort dies, but is quickly replaced by somebody else. Someone unlikely.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

This Saturday, Edith came over from Kootenay, and she, Kurt, Tracy, and I went to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on Imax. Luckily for us, I had bought our tickets earlier in the week online since they sold out quickly. Crisia had a weekend off and was in Saskatchewan. Nikhil is anti-Harry Potter and chose to stay home by himself and watch 24. In the end, he actually didn’t watch 24 and read Archie comics instead (I don’t know about you, but I think that’s a little bit more pathetic than going to see a Harry Potter movie).

If any of you haven’t already seen this but intend to see it at some point, I suggest that you go see it in 3-d at an Imax theatre. Twenty minutes of the movie at the climax of the story occurs in 3-d, and it is simply awesome. I really enjoyed how it made it appear as if I could reach out and touch things in the movie. It made me feel as if I was in the scene.

As for the movie itself, I found it quite enjoyable. I’m not entirely sure how it compares to the last two movies, and I think I would need to watch it again in order to determine this. As a movie, it was really good. I think it flowed better than the last one, but was definitely not as cinematically pleasing as Prisoner of Azkaban. It was a good portrayal of how dark the book was, but time constraints prevent it from even scratching the surface of everything that was in the books.

Jen’s predictions for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Since the seventh and final book of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, is being released Friday at midnight, I would like to end this post with a few of my own predictions. If you have not read up until the end of book six and intend to, I suggest you read no further. Furthermore, if you have read all the books but would not like my opinion to influence your own, you should probably also refrain from reading on. If you would like reasons for my specific predictions, I am open to questioning in the comments.

• Harry is a Horcrux.
• Harry lives (it took me a long time to come to this conclusion, especially given the above prediction, but I feel that somehow he must pull through).
• Voldemort dies.
• Snape is good and was in love with Lily Potter.
• Harry does not return to Hogwarts as a student but will for other reasons.
• We will see what's behind that veil in the Ministry and see Sirius Black again.
• Dumbledore's portrait and the Pensieve will be important.
• R. A. B is Regulus Black, and the locket is the one they found at Grimmauld Place and is either being held by Kreacher or was sold by Mundungus to Aberforth Dumbledore (who incidentally will also be important in this book).
  
• Harry and Ginny will get back together.
• Ron and Hermione will finally express their undying love for each other and will both live.
• Good people who will die other than the above: Moody, Hagrid, Lupin, Arthur Weasley, Neville.
• Bad people who will die other than the above: Lucius Malfoy, Bellatrix Lestrange, Wormtail.
• In between people who will die: Draco Malfoy, Snape, Percy Weasley.
• And completely out there: Harry will travel back in time to Godric’s Hollow.

Vacation

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here. This is not because I have not had much to say, nor is it because I’ve gotten bored with this whole blogging business and am too lazy to write anything. The fact is that I have been busy and will, therefore, have a lot of difficulty relating to all of you what exactly it is that I have been doing without being tedious. I will therefore simply give you an overview of everything that has occurred. If you would like me to go into greater detail on anything, simply ask in the comments. If you don’t have the patience to read all of this at once, I would suggest reading it section by section.

Eliott in Kananaskis

Eliott, my better half as a former boss of ours called him, decided to spend his two weeks off with me. Because I only had one week off, he therefore spent the first half of this watching me (and helping me) work. Before Eliott came here, he spent the weekend in Calgary with his aunt and uncle. He was only going to drive in on the Monday morning.

To surprise him, I called his aunt while I knew he was out with his uncle and arranged to come over to their place with the help Kurt, Tracy, Denise, and Crisia, who had to drive in to Calgary to drop Denise at the airport and were spending the day there seeing the sights. Eliott actually did a double-take when he saw me, as if he didn’t recognize who I was. It turns out that he had planned to surprise me by showing up the Sunday night. We had brunch with his family and spent the afternoon walking around downtown and in the park. After ice cream, we met Kurt, Tracy, Denise, and Crisia, who were having supper, and drove in to Kananaskis together, saving Eliott the trouble of getting lost by himself.

His first day here, we went into Canmore, where we simply walked around and ate lunch. The second day, we spent the day in Banff, where we took the gondola up to Sulphur Mountain, walked around Moraine Lake, and went to the hot springs. Prior to this particular week, I had a lot of free time and could have spent a lot of time with Eliott gallivanting across as many mountains as we desired. However, my supervisor had come in to check on us the evening we were in Banff and was staying for a few days. This was great in that I could finally figure out exactly what I needed to do for my project but not-so-great in that I had a lot of work to do to get my project off the ground before I left for my vacation.

Hence, in addition to accompanying Crisia and me (Nikhil was on vacation in Toronto) on a couple of our long-term grids, Eliott also spent a couple afternoons helping me clean and move cages to set up my experiment. Some of you might find it interesting to know that one evening, Eliott and I cooked supper for ourselves, Crisia, and Jack, my supervisor on Eliott’s third day here. The next morning, Jack took us three grad students (Nikhil had come back) and Eliott for a long drive to find a new site for his field course, and that evening the staff at the field station held a barbeque for all the researchers. This came with free beer and wine, so it took us a while to get everyone up to come out to a brew pub in Canmore.

Jack left early the Friday morning, and after much prodding, a bunch of us took on the 3 hour drive to the Royal Tyrell museum in Drumheller. I believe this was the site of many dinosaur fossil discoveries, so they built a huge museum there. We had a great time there and went to an Irish pub for dinner, where we played Guess Who, Disney Guess Who, and Connect Four. Afterwards, Eliott and I went to his uncle’s house in Calgary to start my one week of vacation, and Crisia, Nikhil, Kurt, and Tracy returned to Kananaskis.

Weekend in Calgary

On Saturday, Eliott, and I took his thirteen-year-old cousin, Emma, to the zoo. We saw a few of the animals that Eliott failed to see in Kananaskis, as well as many more you would never find in Kananaskis. Calgary’s zoo is actually quite well done. After having dinner with the rest of his family, the three of us went to see Ratatouille, which is actually one of the better animated movies I have seen in a while, especially since it takes place in Paris.

The next day, which was Canada Day, all of us went to Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, which is a site where the natives used to chase the buffalo off a cliff. There is a very nice museum that goes along with it. We saw the musical ride of the RCMP in a small town close to that afterwards. We took the long way back to Calgary, which is more scenic and passes through a place called Longview, where my supervisor at Concordia told me I would find the world’s best beef jerky. Not being a connoisseur of beef jerky, I can’t tell you that it’s the best, but I can tell you that it is rather good.

The next morning, we were up at 4:30AM to catch our early flights to Vancouver.

Vancouver Part 1

We landed in Vancouver early enough to have an entire day ahead of us. We managed to find our way to Jeremy’s house without too much difficulty even though Jeremy neglected to name one of the stops we needed to get off at. Jeremy rents out a room in a house along with a few others. The owners supply them with food, cooking them their suppers. The owners also have a cat, which I was very happy to learn since I hadn’t seen a cat since I left Bucky at the end of April. We went out for breakfast with Jeremy, took a walk along the coast, and then into Stanley Park. The trees are so big in Stanley Park, and we got to see a couple young raccoons begging for food. After that, we walked around downtown and went back to Jeremy’s to take a nap before going out for a huge sushi dinner.

The next day, while Jeremy was at work, Eliott and I went to Granville Island, which has a very nice market. Not doing very much planning in advance, we ended up walking most of the way from there to the Vancouver Aquarium, which was an extremely long walk. The aquarium was very nice, and we got to see the famous you tube hand-holding sea otters. They weren’t holding hands when we saw them, but they were very cute. Afterwards, we meant to go watch Jeremy’s softball game, but the combination of long bus waits, very poor bus directions (Jeremy neglected to tell us to transfer buses), and an early ending game meant that we never got there, and Jeremy met us afterwards for supper. We played a couple games when we got back: one involving colourful eyeglasses with snake noses and the other involving penguins and fish.

Victoria

Because Jeremy would be working for most of the week, Eliott and I decided to spend a couple days in Victoria. The trip there, including taking the bus to the ferry, the ferry to Vancouver Island, and then the bus into Victoria, took 4.5 hours. We spent our entire time there walking around, going into little shops, and walking along the harbour. The second night we spent part of the evening at the hostel watching a live show. The girl, Felicia Harding, sang mostly folk rock tunes, some covers from Iron and Wine, to the Beatles, to Tom Petty, to Third Eye Blind, to Tegan and Sara, as well as some of her own stuff. Our room happened to be right above the lounge where this was going on, so this is also what we fell asleep to, which was better than the open mic stuff we fell asleep to the night before.

Vancouver Part 2

Upon our return to Vancouver, we were to meet Jeremy at his work to drop off our stuff, but through the combination of somewhat incomplete instructions, our misunderstanding of where exactly Jeremy worked, and Eliott’s possible poor listening skills, we ended up at the opposite end of the city to where we wanted to be. We managed to find our way back to his house to meet him there before going out for dinner on Commercial Drive, where you can find many cute and ethnic restaurants (This also happened to be where we had ended up when we meant to meet Jeremy at UBC, even though we didn’t know at the time that we were supposed to go to UBC).

We spent our last day in Vancouver on the UBC campus, where we saw where Jeremy worked, went to the Anthropology Museum, and walked along Wreck beach. This beach is a very beautiful but interesting beach. If you are unfamiliar with it, I suggest you look it up if you want an idea as to where we were actually wandering. In the evening, we went to the Richmond Night Market, which is like any ordinary flea market except that it’s Asian and operates at night. There they sell your usual cheap clothing, but they also sell popular Asian toys and pirated DVDs. The most interesting part of the market is the food section. It’s like going out for dim sum with you going to the food rather than the food coming to you. It was really rather delicious, but so many little things add up in the end.

Now I’m back in Kananaskis and back to work and will undoubtedly scrounge around to have more to tell you more regularly. I update this post when I have some of the pictures up.

Update

I have added pictures of a coyote and a moose and its baby to the Wildlife in Kananaskis album; these didn't turn out so well. I have added a new album called Hanging out at KFS. Pictures from Eliott's and my vacation, as described above, have been divided into 4 albums: Banff, Drumheller, Calgary, and Vancouver and Victoria. I will eventually get around to captioning some of this. As I get Eliott's pictures, I will also add some of those.