Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Tea, not Kool-aid

Just to clarify, yesterday when I was referring to there being liquor stores inside of grocery stores in NJ, I did not mean all NJ grocery stores and I did not mean that you can pick up a bottle of wine along with your lettuce. The stores that do have the liquor stores have them attached. In all the ones I have seen, you can enter the liquor store via the regular store, but they have a different cash register you must use. And they keep separate hours, usually closing earlier than the grocery store, and not being open on Sundays.

How much tea is too much tea? Today I felt groggy from the moment I woke up and so I drank 2 mugs of hot tea before noon. Then I had a cup of iced tea in the middle of the afternoon and now I'm having another. I feel as if I am thwarting the rule of one or two cups of caffeine per day. But it's just tea! It's not like it's coffee. I clearly drink more of both the hot and cold varieties now that I have an electric kettle on my desk and a huge stash of tea in my desk (thanks to Jeff).

The thing is, I really love the taste of tea. And I don't see the point of drinking caffeine-free anything.

I got a new camera! I got an unexpected bonus at work, so I spent all of it right away on a fancy new camera. What? No judging. Especially not the fact that I spent it before I even got it and I asked Jeff to figure out how much I would get after they took out the taxes and he over-estimated by $150 and I spent the amount he guessed I would get. Oh well! I can pretend that I got a fancy new camera for $150, right? Right. I went out on Saturday and played with it while Jeff stayed home reading that Potter stuff.

Speaking of that Potter stuff, should I read it? I feel like at this point I should just wait until our future kid is old enough and I'll read it out loud then. Jeff was always in that camp with me until, for some reason, he decided to go ahead and read them. And then he got all Potterfied and did nothing but read for over a week. He even stayed up until 2:30 a.m. last Saturday night, finishing the last book, which is totally unlike him. (Normally, if he reads in bed, his eyes are closed within 20 minutes.) And now he's trying to get me to drink the Kool-aid, but I'm still not sure I'm going to buy into this cult. I just don't want to invest my time reading 2-3 books that are guaranteed to be especially childish. And I do recall rolling my eyes a lot at the first movie. And then of course, there's that part of me that rebels against reading what everyone else is reading.

For the record, reading in bed does not put me to sleep. I suppose I could read the dictionary in bed. That might do the trick...

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Drink the Kool Aid, Craige. I love the Potter books.

And one can never drink too much tea.

Unknown said...

Craige, you're way too late to be rebellious on this one. The time to be rebellious was when everyone was reading it on the subway. You know you want to.

Anonymous said...

You already know my thoughts on the matter. Kool-Aid Man's gonna come bustin' through our living room, saying "Oh Yeah!" and bringing Potterific refreshment! Yes, I had no interest initially.

Having not read the book, I reluctantly went to see the first movie on opening night because the trailer for Star Wars Episode II was supposed to precede it. Little did I know that that particular theater didn't feel the need to carry the trailer. So that kind of soiled my initial Potter experience, not bothering to even see the second flick til I happened upon it on HBO a couple years later. Same with the third one.

But it was after seeing Azkaban a few times that I thought maybe I should start reading the books. Though I took more than a year off after reading the first book because I had "more important things" I wanted to read in between. I actually did decide to see the fourth film in theaters a year before reading the second book. Then the interval between books 2 and 3 shrunk to six months--at this point having seen the Order of the Phoenix film.

Then it shrunk even further after reading book 4, as did the time it took to read the much-longer books, to the point where I read book 5 in two weeks, book 6 in four days and book 7 in about 2 and a half days.

This very unecessarily detailed post is just my way of saying, HARRY POTTER IS THE LITERARY EQUIVALENT OF CRACK!!!!!!!!! DAMN YOU, ROWLING, FOR TURNING ME INTO A CRACKWHORE!!! But like any good junkie, I'm co-dependent, so I REQUIRE you to read them immediately!!

Chelle said...

Oh, they are so worth reading now. And you will probably want to reread them to your kids later. Hell, I want to reread them all and I've already read them! But I felt that way after His Dark Materials too. Come on, Craige...all the cool kids are doing it!

alyce said...

Drink it. They're very fast reads, so it's not like you'll have to devote years to getting it done.

I read them because all of my kids were reading them (I was teaching at the time; my kids = my students), and I felt I had to. I was hooked almost instantly.

I won't tell you that I stood in line for the last two, because that would just be silly. I'm 34 not 14. harrumph

Anonymous said...

Alyce, there's no need to be ashamed of standing in line. There were actual adults-only midnight release parties when it came out last year. Two of my friends went. They served alcohol, so no kiddies allowed.

Anonymous said...

Give in...you know you want to. I promise it's totally worth it.

Notice how many comments you've gotten on this post? Come over to the Potter side....JOIN US!!!

Unknown said...

Give in and enjoy the Potter. One of us! One of us!

To answer your question/comment to my last post (blogger won't let me reply back), "Frog" means to unravel something that was knitted. We call it frogging because you "rip it, rip it". Yes, knitters think they're hilarious.

bluesleepy said...

The Potter books really grow up with Harry; the first one is rather childish, but the last one is anything but a child's book. I was even shocked to see so many darkness in what was supposed to be a kid's novel. I find them excellent reads, but then I'm with you -- I'm not a huge fan of reading a book just because everyone else says it's awesome. This is why I almost always refuse to buy an Oprah's Book Club book.

In RI, you can't even buy beer in the grocery store. We found that out the hard way the day of the Super Bowl. But there was a liquor store right next door, so it wasn't so bad. In WA (and in VA too, right?), you can buy beer and wine at the grocery store, but liquor at the ABC store. In AZ, you can buy ANYTHING at the grocery store. Vodka with your lettuce? Sure thing! It's so weird to see. But then AZ also has drive-through liquor stores, too.