A Harry Pottery kind of weekend

Have I moved from this couch in the last 24 hours? Well yes, one does still need to get up to eat or bathroom or sleep in one's bed. There is a Harry Potter pop-up channel and it is on my TV and my couch is in front of it so between aforesaid exceptions, I have been slugging out in wizardry world.

"How grand it must be, to be the Chosen One." Professor Snape.

Life for Harry is getting more complicated and desaturated as we start the Half Blood Prince. Some questions are surfacing as I watch this incredible (for lots of reasons) body of work:

  • How much damage to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry has Harry Potter been responsible for?
  • Wizards have banks, do they have insurance companies?
  • Did Ginny Weasley use a love potion to snag Harry? (spoiler alert) 
  • Would Harry make a good Hogwarts Headmaster? Or would Neville Longbottom be a better choice?
  • Why do the directors show Ron as the butt of jokes and increasingly incompetent when he starts out such a smart and talented kid in the first movie?
  • "Why is it when something happens, it's always you three?" asks Professor McGonagall to Hermione, Ron and Harry. "Believe me Professor, I've been asking myself the same question for six years." Ron replies.

My favourite of the seven movies is Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Mostly because the characters are treated with a fair brush and the "Dark Lord" isn't featured apart from a mention now and then. It's quite a complicated story too as it involves a bit of time manipulation (spoiler alert?) and not very many things get broken or damaged.

Freestylin' a al Dooce.com

Flipping heck, people - where are all the blog posts?

Oh no, don't worry. I haven't written or posted them: they're not lost or anything. They're just not here because they don't exist.

See that calendar in the right hand bar? It gets a little grey square on each day I post something to thejamjar.com. Those grey squares are too few and too far apart. BTW I am actually ignoring the larger grey square, also to the right, where my Instagram photos (used to) show because well, grey square reasons.

So back to the calendar; when I see how few and far between those boxes are I think "that's so not good enough, Michelle. Come on, rattle your dags and post something for Glob's sacks!" (sacks? sakes, I meant sakes).

Hehe, Glob's Sacks - I like that.

Here's @jamjar & @dooce, judging each other and finding themselves glorious. #webstock

7 Likes, 2 Comments - Josh Kinal (@sealfur) on Instagram: "Here's @jamjar & @dooce, judging each other and finding themselves glorious. #webstock"

ANYWAY. I WAS OOPS, I was just on dooce.com reading Heather Armstrong's blog posts and she has written some very flipping fantastic articles in her 18 years online. Her writing feng shui is strong; I've always envied it. The article I just read though wasn't an article; it was just one of these: open the blog editing window and type. Or at least that's what it appeared to be. And it made me remember how much I used to do that and how much I really like doing that and how I think that the energy that is captured in such posts - if not so many nominations for the Nobel Blog Prize - makes up for all the grammatical and stylistic problems associated with just typing.

So here I am just typing.

I'm doing Camp NaNoWriMo and VEDA (Vlog Every Day in April) because of course I am. Why wouldn't I sign up for projects that I fail at every.single.year. It's not about succeeding (according to my inner-quitter) it's about having fun and I am doing that.

Camp NaNoWriMo is held in April whereas NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is held in November. The Camp is more flexible and we are sorted into cabins (writing groups). The flexibility comes with what and how much you want to write. The goal is to develop a habit of writing and also to free up your fingers to not be so precious in the draft stages. I've set myself a goal of writing 30,000 blogpost words as opposed to the customary 50,000 word novel. Oo and I just realised THIS IS GOING TO COUNT! *fist bump* YES!

VEDA happens in months that start with the letter A so the acronym works. Each day I make a vlog - which is a video log of one's life - and generally is a personal, talking to the camera thing. The object of the exercise is to develop a habit, "get over yourself" being in front of a camera and to develop the skills to make a good job of creating video.' There really isn't time for much more during the week because of work and kids and stuff.

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