I'm Back from my Poconos trip

Yesterday I returned from Pennsylvania and the annual Hoberg family reunion. First I flew to Philadelphia, then drove to my aunt and uncle's house, where I spent two nights before driving to my great-uncle's lodge in the Poconos, where I stayed for a week with some of my extended family, whom I'm sure you would love to hear about, so I'll give you a quick rundown of the tree. ROSA Present at the Poconos were: Jan and Mark Gingold with identical twin daughters Sara and Beth and son Daniel (Beth brought her boyfriend Jeremy and Dan brought his girlfriend Janelle), Rick and Jeanne Hoberg with son Matthew and daughter Mellissa (Mellissa brought her friend Kim), Peter Hoberg with son William (me) and daughter Becca, Chris and Ron Bizer with sons Stephen and Tim and daughter Kate, my father's parents Shirley and George Hoberg, Shirley's brother, Bill Kieser, his daughter Valerie, and Don and Jane, whom I don't really know. ROSA Not present were: bunches of other Hobergs, Areharts, and Harrisons.

The lodge overlooks Silver Lake, of which a picture can be found in the upper right corner of this post. The lake is great for swimming and for catching fish. This year I landed three rather large fish, of which I am very proud, a pickerel and two bass. It has long been tradition for the entire family to converge on this site and cause havoc from sheer numbers. This year had a relatively small crowd compared to other years, but there was still lots of havoc. What was really awesome was that all week long there was a chance of thunderstorms, but it didn't so much as rain until the one night our cookout was planned.

There was a dilapidated pool table there, and I played just about everyone on it. I'm not very good at pool. I was introduced to a new game called Pictionary-Telephone, which is exceedingly fun. I visited two waterfall parks, which were both fun, and managed to skip a rock 4 times. I found out that the fish in Silver Lake are attracted to sunscreen the hard way (they chased me out of the water). And I joined The Woodbumz, my cousins' white-rap group. Their names? Ginga Snapz, Bredd Loaf, 20-Inch D, Ju-C Juice, and Vanilla Bean Speck (Matthew, Tim, Daniel, Stephen, and me). They featured me on the track "Damn, it Feels Good to Be a Woodbum," which I believe will be on their album of the same name. Stick around for rhymes to be published on this blog.

tired

Way too tired. Will blog lots tomorrow.

My T-shirt

I forgot about the T-shirt I got yesterday. It's awesome! It says Yogipie. It's purple and brown. I would love to have 5,000 of them to give out to random people. Methinks that would increase readership more than one-thousandfold. I think I should update more speedily.

-Yogipie the Readerless

Harmonica

I wish I knew how to play the harmonica. And yet even if I knew how, I don't think I would be very good at it; my lungs are phenomenally weak. I might learn how to play anyway, because the harmonica is such an awesome instrument. Lately I have been really into these songs:"Walk Like an Egyptian" by the Bangles, "She's not There" by Santana, and the Monk theme by Jeff Beal. This post was pretty random. I will be back later with more to talk about... hopefully.

Table of Harry Potter Statistics

I "learned" how to do this with HTML. Oh yeah, and my hardcover HP collection is complete now that Deathly Hallows has been added. Don't ask me why there's a mile of empty space there; just scroll through and examine my handiwork!

Book	# of Pages	# of Chapters	Average # of Pages per Chapter
Sorcerer's Stone	309	17	18
Chamber of Secrets	341	18	19
Prisoner of Azkaban	435	22	20
Goblet of Fire	734	37	20
Order of the Phoenix	870	38	23
Half-Blood Prince	652	30	22
Deathly Hallows	759 (including Epilogue)	36 (excluding Epilogue)	21 (excluding Epilogue)

SPOILER ALERT

I finished Deathly Hallows Sunday night; sorry I'm so late, but as time is no longer my goal I feel free as a... damn, I've got nothing (Don't you hate it when your similes elude you?). ROSA I thought it was an excellent read, certainly epic, and certainly exciting enough to keep slow readers up in the wee hours of the morning. The body count, however, was tragically, unnecessarily, and yet unsurprisingly high. I simply don't think J.K. needed to kill off so many friends to satisfy her readers. I created a neat circuit today, using an electronics kit. It made a whistling or beeping sound when the lights went on. I thought it would be cool to have several different circuits in several different rooms all set at different frequencies, and use the fuse box as a musical keyboard.... Tomorrow I am going to buy myself a customized airbrushed T-shirt bearing the name Yogipie; it's going to be awesome!

Copperfield's

I went on a trip to Copperfield's Books today. I finally pre-ordered Deathly Hallows, which was long overdue. I'm also going to the party. I got a spiffy bookmark of the 4 house logos. I bought hardcovers of Sorcerer's Stone and Prisoner of Azkaban. The only one I still need is #4. This is a little late, but I'm really excited that Monk and Psych have started their new seasons on USA. I love watching those shows every Friday night.

Life Sucks

I've given up on my goal of blogging about Deathly Hallows. After all, the book is released five hours earlier in England... plenty of time to finish it.

Various Topics

1. I started my own "library of favorites" for contemporary literary classics, and thus I have started to pursue new copies of all my favorites so I can keep them forever, but my mom thinks this is a silly practice and that I should, I dunno, hunt down battered old paperbacks at garage sales and read them once and then donate them to charity or something. ROSA Okay, so that might be an exaggeration of sorts, but that's her state of mind. My point of view is that in this ever changing, tragic world of ours, I really take solace in reliability and stability.

2. I've been rereading the Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud. Excellent fantasy series, and if you haven't read it you have to do so or you're a... how to put this nicely... SATANIC PIG-HATING COMMUNIST!

3. I treated myself to a shiny new hardcover copy of the original Chamber of Secrets for my library. No more of this silly Anti-Illustrationist movement.

4. I got seventy dollars and several euros richer yesterday; it's pretty happy.

5. Due to said new funding, more Harry Potter hardcover purchases may be on the way.

6. The movie adaptation (if you could call it an adaptation) of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is absolutely terrible. You have this overly and overtly opinionated and unheathily adverbial blogger's advice not to go see it, and his word that unless by chance of stupidity and ignorance, you haven't actually read any of the books, all parts of the movie will disappoint except - I almost regret saying this - the brilliant, spot-on portrayals of Luna Lovegood and Dolores Umbridge. ROSA I would almost see it again just to see Luna say her lines again, which, by the way, are almost all intact from the canon... Seriously, weird in exactly the way I imagined her to be in the book. Oh, and in the chance of said stupidity and ignorance, SIRIUS BLACK IS MURDERED BY BELLATRIX LESTRANGE AT THE END.

7. ROSA is a new good friend of mine, a novel sort of punctuation mark if you will, a running joke, but the kind that isn't funny. The first person to email me telling me what the mark does will win a great big sundae on me.

GREEN

With Live Earth having been (admittedly) a while ago, It's the least I can do (or is it?) to tell you that you can make a difference!!! Join the Alliance for Climate Protection. Small things add up, so try your best to uh, be green!

Back to the Blog

I haven't blogged in ages, and not since I went camping at Yosemite with the YMCA and my friend Caleb. I found lookalikes to a friend's mom, Shia LaBeouf, and my sister's friend. I saw a black bear rip open a log. I hiked Vernal Falls and Yosemite Falls. But none of that matters. My life will have neither meaning nor purpose until Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is released. My goal is to be among the first to blog about it, but I doubt that's going to happen, and for two good reasons. One, people have probably already blogged about it, and two, some people, like my sister, can read a book like that in something like four hours, a superpower I, sadly, do not have. I'm going to see Order of the Phoenix on the 14th, which sounds exciting if inaccurate and superficial (sorry, I had to vent). Wikipedia's list/ dictionary of Harry Potter spells is horribly full of holes; it does not even come close to sticking with the canon it specifies. On a completely different note, tracing someone's genealogy back thousands of years is not quite as easy as it sounds, even when that person comes from the house of Levi.

A Wrinkle in Time

I took a short (3-day) break from Harry Potter between #5 and #6 to read Madeleine L'Engle's classic A Wrinkle in Time. Very very good science fiction novel, nice and short compared to Harry Potter books. If you haven't read it, you're really missing out. I found the fantasy and science fiction elements of the story to be very inspiring for a short story I'm writing called "Angels and Men," loosely based on the music of Juno Reactor.

Classical Music

Classical music... what an odd entity! Considering very few classical songs actually have titles, it was obviously not meant for the information age, but who can blame the classic composers? It's not like any of them ever heard of a search engine. Classical classification remains only by division, from a composer to an opus to a suite to a song (brief spark of pop-culture familiarity) to a movement (what?) My favorite composer is... Hiromi Uehara, hands down. She is the piano virtuoso. Who is your favorite composer?

Decline in Harry Potter Books

I think I have found out why the fifth and sixth books of Harry Potter are my least favorite ones. The reason is not that the books have gotten darker and the tone more serious. It's not even that Mary Grandpre's illustrations have become less cartoony. It's because all the character roles in which the readers got so set over the first four books get changed and turned upside down. For example, in The Order of the Phoenix Ginny stops being all crazy about Harry and starts dating, and in The Half-Blood Prince, Harry is "hungry" for Ginny (creepy). Harry becomes a very angry young man, the government are complete morons, and Sirius gets himself killed. Neville becomes less dorky and Ron gets on the Quidditch team.... It all adds up to a seriously confusing Harry Potter world the likes of which we didn't see in the first four parts. And that is why my order of favoritism is 241356. w00t.

Word List

I have been interested in excellent words and phrases to use for quite some time now. I have compiled a running list of my favorite words. It is composed of not only English words, but also phrases and foreign-language words. But all of the contents have one thing in common: a special flow of sound. With the phrases especially, the cadence and rhythm is very important. This is exemplified in the phrases Supreme Mugwump, Richard Nixon, and Ottery St. Catchpole. Four of my words have the "qua" sequence because that is a cool pattern. I look forward to using these oddments on my readers (1 person) soon. This enthralling, alphabetically-sorted list can be found at the bottom of my blog.

REI Purchases

I got some great stuff at REI this morning, including: a mess kit, a fold-flat mug, light hiking boots, flip-flops, two lightweight heavy-duty T-shirts, and a large dark Toblerone bar. If there are better things in life, I've never heard of them. And the best part was my mom paid for all of it! My favorite things are... all of them! A very productive trip indeed.

Camping

From June 25th on, I will basically be solidly camping for the rest of the summer. More on that later. I am looking forward to the various trips, but I'm afraid I might be too busy to do much. I'm paying a visit to REI tomorrow morning to purchase some outdoor gear. I love toast. Toast will make a good camping snack.... The Spanish word for camping is "camping," with an accent on the a, which makes it the funniest Spanish word of all time, especially in context. For example, "Este verano mis amigos y yo vamos de camping." Hilarious. Blog you later, hopefully with something more substantial to talk about.

Disturbia

I finally went and saw Disturbia yesterday. It was alright. Personally, I found it pretty scary. It had me shaking in my seat. There were lots of creepy dead bodies hidden in the most unexpected places. They try pretty hard to make Shia LaBeouf's character, Cale, look like a "normal" testosterone-filled teenage boy. He plays XBox 360, half-stalks the hot blonde girl across the street, socks his Spanish teacher in the face, and would do anything for his iPod. However, even so, the film never feels dry or forced. After getting into house arrest for said Spanish-teacher-punching, Cale notices his other neighbor, Mr. Turner, the one that's neither hot nor blonde nor a girl, doing suspiciously-like-a-notorious-serial-killer-from-Texas things. So he joins forces with Ashley (his neighbor) and Ron, his best friend, to stake out Mr. Turner's house. They hit a lot of dead ends in which something that makes him look like he's a psycho serial killer turns out to be harmless. But in the end, Mr. Turner is a psycho serial killer. He has a lab for disembowelment and like I said, lots of unexpected places for him to hide the corpses. It all ends well, though, and by the end, Shia has dropped approximately infinity S-bombs. Not a movie for younger children.

No spoilers please!

How people already know things about the 7th Harry Potter book, I have no idea. Nor would I like to have any idea. I am one of those people who can't stand to have a bit of plot revealed beforehand. I seemingly cannot do anything on the Internet without having HP spoilers shoved in my face! Listen, if it's an official press release from J.K.R. herself, even if it's just a wild theory of yours, I don't want to hear so much as a morphograph about it!

Potter Plotter

It's time for a little plot discussion. At the end of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Severus Snape murders Professor Dumbledore, which is a huge bummer. My sister holds her belief that Snape is innocent for one reason or another. For one thing, there is a passage from the 6th book where Dumbledore is telling Snape to do something he does not want to do. She also thinks that he was trying to stop Malfoy from becoming an evil Dark murderer by killing Dumbledore. Is Snape serving his benign headmaster? Or is he trying to prevent his favorite student from heading down the path Snape himself once took? Either way, Malfoy already has been Dark-Marked, which means he's probably going to end up serving Lord Voldemort, unless he displays the same resilience seen from Snape and Karkaroff (doubtful, because we all know Draco's a pansy).

I think the only reason Snape ever came to Hogwarts was because he could hide from the Dark Lord he pusillanimously abandoned. Dumbledore trusted him and gave him a second chance. Snape bided his time, and when Lord Voldemort returned, Snape had to regain his trust by taking down a major good guy.

Here is an interesting lead on Draco Malfoy's identity: http://www.mugglenet.com/editorials/editorials/edit-hseeker01.shtml

Farewell, Muggles!