I am a big fan of rules.  I like to be given a set of instructions, and I like to follow them.  I’m the sort who does really really well when someone says, “I’d like 500 words written about iguanas, and I want it by 4 pm on Tuesday.”  I can promise you, you would have those 500 words about iguanas by 3:59 pm Tuesday.  Who am I kidding?  You’d have them by 5 pm Monday.  Unless you told me that you only want the piece on Tuesday.  In that case, I would finish it by Monday and then place a post-it note reminder some place conspicuous so I don’t forget to give it to you promptly at 4 pm Tuesday.

I have a library book due today.  On Tuesday night, I realized that I would never finish it in time.  I began stressing out about the idea of leaving the book unfinished.  I started talking incessantly about how I couldn’t finish the book rather than sitting and reading the book.  My plan was to return the book to the library and then linger there for hours until the book went back on the shelf so I could snatch it up and check it out again.

Finally, Josh gently said, “at 50 cents a day, why don’t you just keep the book out a few extra days, apologize to the librarian, and pay the fine.”

Is he fucking kidding?  Isn’t keeping out a library book past the due date as badass as snorting coke off your dashboard as you do 90 up the shoulder of I-95 the day before Thanksgiving?

Keeping out library books past their due date is illeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeegal.

What?  It’s not actually a law?

I decided to let Josh be a bad influence on me and keep the book out a few extra days.  I can’t remember the last time I was this wild.

What would you have done if you were in the middle of a book you really wanted to read with no chance of getting your hands on it again for a long time?  Would you have returned it and bought a copy?  Not returned it and eaten the fines?  Returned it and waited months to check it out again?  Hang around the library until it goes back on the shelf?  Or something far crazier than the options I was considering?

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week as well as the week before.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Sometimes There are Just No Words” (I Believe in Miracles)
• “Dancing” (Bio Girl)
• “Stages of Life” (Anabegins)
• “Gandhi and Gestone” (The Lucky Life)
• “My Twi-Life” (Aidan, Baby of Mine)
• “For November – Not Quite a PSA” (I Lost a World)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Do Without Doing has a post about scars— the physical kind as well as those left behind by infertility.  I especially love the ending: “It seems like every piece of my life has been touched by infertility.  Scars do heal, but they leave a mark.”  You’ll need to read the whole post to understand.

Waiting for Little Feet has a letter she wrote to her grandmother who has been gone for 10 years.  Though they didn’t really connect on an emotional level while her grandmother was alive, she has since felt a kinship with her knowing their similar fertility stories.  She sees her grandparent’s marriage in an entirely new light; a situation created both by circumstances and the time period in which the miscarriages were experienced.  She cannot go backwards in time and talk about this with her grandmother; she can only go forward knowing that strong women came before her.  A warning; bring tissues for the end of the post.

Reese Dixon has a fantastic post about watching the Muppet movie with her son.  Okay, her post got me bawling at this point: “Then came a part in the movie when Kermit and Miss Piggy sang Rainbow Connection, and I totally lost it. I was overwhelmed in that moment of watching my baby love something that I loved, awash in the nostalgia of my own childhood, reconnecting with what felt like long lost friends, and that scene in Matilda came back to me. As bad as things were before, that’s how good they became.”  A beautiful, must-read post about realizing how far you’ve come.

Life and Love in the Petri Dish has a post about her sister becoming her egg donor.  The post was fascinating.  The lines that stuck out the most for me were that “Her take home message was that my sister’s ability to donate eggs to us would be a gift, an amazing gift. And one that we might need to work a little harder on just learning to receive and say thank you for, rather than analyzing it and then analyzing it some more.”  That was just a huge, huge, huge thought — applicable in so many places in life.  I loved how this post made me think.

Lastly, The Elusive Second Line has a post about being 5 dpo.  She admits, “My husband was concerned that I was going to be upset if this cycle didn’t work, I assured him that I wouldn’t be since I did not expect it to work.  I lied.”  But that wasn’t why I loved this to-pee-or-not-to-pee post.  It’s for this line: “Decisions suck. Almost as much as infertility.”  Damn straight.

The roundup to the Roundup: I play by the library rules and lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between November 18th and November 25th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

Imagine your life five years from now: what do you hope is down the road? What is right beyond the bend in the trees?  A nice thought to play around with in your mind as you sit at your Thanksgiving meal and consider how it will look in just a half a decade.

As you’ve probably heard by now, Warner Bros. is vaulting the Harry Potter DVDs — as in prying those DVDs you’ve been wondering if you should buy but haven’t sucked it up and paid for yet — on December 29th. After that point, you will not be able to purchase the DVDs anymore once supplies run out. They’ll re-release the films in the future at which point they expect that consumers will drink them in like water found at an oasis. That we’ll be so Harry-starved that we’ll devour two or three DVD copies each in order to satiate our Potter-appetite.

Or something like that.

Perhaps Warner Bros. will be hiding them in Vault 713.

I’ve seen mixed reports that the online versions will also be gone, and other newspapers that report that the online versions will be available for download. As is, Harry Potter 7, Part 1, has already disappeared from iTunes, and from what I’ve read, there’s a good chance that it won’t be coming back at all as a singular — and therefore less expensive than being forced to buy parts 1 and 2 together — download. The twins are so into Harry Potter that we decided not to take our chances — we purchased the 7 out of 8 films from iTunes so we have them for the future.

This is the PSA: in the time it took me to decide to do this last week until the time I actually got off my ass and hit the button on my computer, the price went up $3 per film. They were selling for $6.99 last week, and they were $9.99 when I downloaded them this week. I may end up regretting that I bought high if the price drops again after Thanksgiving, or I may end up breathing an enormous sigh of relief if the price goes up to $12.99 as we near Christmas and the vaulting deadline. Or what if they go up to $4 million PER FILM? See, then you won’t be laughing if you have to pay $28 million for 7 out of 8 films (since you can’t get Harry Potter 7, Part 1 anymore… that just saved you $4 million dollars) in order to fill your iPhone.

So.

Well done, Warner Bros, well done. I have played straight into your trap; purchasing Harry Potter movie copies with abandon. But when the long, cold Harry Potter winter comes, I’ll be ready. And as we gather around the iPad, watching Dolores Umbridge tell the children “wands away please!,” those of you who do not bend to the will of Warner Bros. will find yourselves standing with your noses pressed against the window, like ten-year-olds without any galleons to shop at Honeydukes.

Enemies of the consumerism heir… beware!

I really don’t want to cut into our annual virtual Thanksgiving meal (please bring a dish and try mine), but Josh sent me this Siri parody (maybe not appropriate for work unless you keep the sound down low) and asked me a question about it. I’ll tell you my answer after you tell me yours:

Was there a point where it stopped being funny to you or did you laugh until the end? Or did you not laugh at all? In other words, was there a point where you were smiling and then you weren’t smiling? Or was it all funny? Or all not funny?