Late Nights and T-shirts

Okay, I'm not going to give away anything about Breaking Dawn yet. I will do a nice long rant about it next week when people have had a chance to read it. Then I will tell you in detail what I thought about it. If you've already read the book, no fair voting on the poll. If you have just been waiting for your friend to finish her copy so you can borrow it, and haven't voted yet, and care to, please do.

I did something on Friday night that I've never done before. I went to a book release party. I was invited by some good friends, and it sounded like fun. We each made T-shirts expressing our love for either Jacob or Edward. That was a lot of fun, and gave us housewives an opportunity to delve into our creative sides a little bit without involving crayons and paste. Plus, it provided us with an outward expression of our inward desires for the outcome of the book that we could display at the bookstore! Here are pictures of the front and back of my T-shirt. It's fairly obvious which way I vote.

After discussing and reviewing the first three books in detail, and speculating about the final book, we headed to Hastings to buy our copies. When we arrived and found we had to park very far away at the Walmart parking lot, I knew we were in for a treat. Hastings was packed from the front to the back of the store, full of people wearing prom dresses (I don't know why, but the store was having an ugly prom dress contest along with the book release), wolf ears and tails, vampire teeth, and, like us, T-shirts. Apparently, if you wanted to assure your possession of the book that night, you could pay some money down on the book ahead of time and reserve a copy. I did not do this. I figured if they ran out I'd pop into Costco the next day and grab one of their gazillion copies. But really, would a store risk running out like that when they have the potential to have record sales for the year? Of course not. So, they had the lines divided up according to last name alphabetically. We were almost the last ones in the H-N line (I think 3 other people were behind us), and it gave us a lovely opportunity to look at all the merchandise that was hanging on the back wall of the store. I almost bought a T-shirt that had a picture of Chris Farley that said, "Living in a van down by the RIVER!!!" Maybe next time. After being smashed against the back wall of the store for about half an hour, the line began to move, and TA DA! At about 1:00am I had my copy in my hot little hands. The rest of my group had a slumber party and read all night. I went home and got in bed. All that excitement was much too exhausting for a tired old lady like myself.

Would I do it again? Maybe. For me, the point wasn't getting the book the second it was available (I could have walked over to Walmart and gotten it at 12:01 without waiting in line and gotten home by 12:30). The point was being with friends and having a girls' night and being silly, which are all very fun things. For a few hours, I pretended I was 18 again and (aside from the inevitable topic of our kids that always pops up no matter how hard you try to avoid it) talked about frivolous vampire romance and how nice it would be to get a pedicure and which one of us made the funniest T-shirt (that was never decided, because we were all far too polite to assert that ours was the best).

I have finished the book, and will let you all finish it as well, and give myself time to stew over it before I tell you what I thought. Whatever my opinion of it was, it sure was fun to buy it this time!