Reading: Middlemarch and Empire Falls.

Listening: How Green Was My Valley. When I do walk to work, which I tell myself I'm going to do next week.

Watching: "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone."

Moving: 'm supposed to go for a walk with Haitch later. Ah, and a good thing I did, because it rained again at noon, when lapswim would have been.

28 July 2002: Rain

It's 8:30 in the morning and raining. I cannot remember another instance of morning rain in my entire seven years in Denver. There was the one day in May 2001? in which a steady rain fell all day, and that was odd too.

There, it's already stopping. Of course, I just watered the vegetable garden moments ago. But I doubt as much as a millimeter fell.

The reason I'm rewatching Harry Potter is that someone alleged there are five Gryffindor boys in the movie, and I remember looking for Dean Thomas and not finding him. They're about to be sorted, so I'll see. And it could be that Dean, a minor character in the first book, is omitted from the movie's sorting. Without speaking of it explicitly, the movie does include the hand-me-down Smeltings uniform and other such book details. So Dean's not being sorted doesn't mean nearly as much as the fact that the first-year Gryffindor boys' dormitory has only four beds, not only in the movie but in the Hogwarts tour in the DVD special feature.

Hmm. There is a black kid sitting next to Seamus when the latter tries to make rum, and walking with the other boys when Ron mocks Hermione. I have to double check the number of beds in the dormitory.

Now it's sunny. That's more like it.

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So far I like Empire Falls, but. The View from Saturday got slammed for winning the Newbery despite confusing "vane" with "vain" or "vein." Empire Falls got the Pulitzer with the following sentence:

"She suspects its mostly evidence of her own stunted emotional and romantic development, as is the fact that she can't seem to stop thinking about how good it was to sit there on the warm sand in the gathering dusk and just hold hands with a boy she liked."

It took me a moment to work out how much good an apostrophe can do. I don't think a book has to be retypeset to be run in paperback, does it? Not for a trade version.