Blogging has been light recently. I'm sure both of you noticed that. There's not really a reason for it. The truth is that I find I'm becoming increasingly reluctant to much time on-line these days, a change that has been coming slowly over the past few years.

I first got on-line over a decade ago and for years my primary amusements on-line revolved around fandom. I met some amazing people, read some astonishing stories (and some astonishingly bad ones), and made some great friends.

It's probably not a coincidence that as my interest in on-line fandom waned, so did my interest in spending hours and hours every week (or, indeed, every day) sitting in front of a computer. (It's not that I didn't search for a new fandom, because I did. In the process, I found and learned to love CSI and West Wing and Monk but not fannishly.)

First I quit writing and now, for all intents and purposes, I've quit reading fanfiction. It's just...it isn't holding my interest. I was in and out of BtVS so fast I never got around to the fanfiction. Whatever fleeting interest HP fandom had for me turned out to be exceptionally fleeting. (All the more so since I have less-than-zero interest in the sexcapades of children, which, at my advanced age, pretty much includes anyone under 25. HP, as a fandom, is just too immature. Plus which...well, that's a spoiler for the latest booki, so I'll stick it at the end of this entry, okay?)

Now...well, now it's summer and the days are long and lazy and every evening I have to choose between sitting next to an open door, smelling the warm summer air, or shutting off the computer and actually going out in the air. As I said before, more and more often I'm choosing Option B. I'm also doing a lot more reading, but the nice thing about a book is that you can take it outside with you, you see. If I'm feeling too lazy to do anything else, I can carry my book across the street, pop into Starbucks for a latte or something cold and sweet with caramel, then move on to the lush grass near the creek or under some shady tree in the park.

I can, as I did a couple of weeks ago, take a summer ride on the Ski Train and spend a day in the mountains. I can go to the Renaissance Festival, ride the Georgetown Loop railway, meet friends for a leisurely afternoon tea, take a bus up through the canyone to Blackhawk and drop $5 in the nickel slot machines, or go haunt the library and work on one of my multitudes of "research projects" if it's raining. I can, as I did this past weekend, experiment with cooking and try to figure out why the food never tastes as good as the recipe makes it sound. I can hem those pants that have been hanging in my closet unworn for three years. I can get some exercise, shop the Farmer's Markets for fresh fruits and vegetables, or stroll down Broadway and spend hundreds of thousands of imaginary dollars furnishing an imaginary house with the gorgeous antiques I can't afford to buy.

And, as I was going to say before I got all distracted by all the things I'd rather be doing than sitting at work today, things have gotten busy around the offices. So much so that I'm feeling a bit guilty about not working more hours, so you can understand my reluctances to spend an hour or two a day blogging.

Anyhow. I'll probably blog from time to time, should anything to say spring to my vacant brain, but this entry is to serve as notice to anyone stopping by that I'm done feeling guilty about not blogging every day. I'm thinking of getting myself a life and the way I look at it, I have time to do it, or time to talk about it , but not both.

N.B. To those of you who pretend to be my "friends." You are not off the hook, so don't even think it, okay? You're stuck with me.
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Hyre Bee Spoylers For Ye Olde Ord O'Phnx (I'm avoiding proper names to prevent this from coming up in a google search, okay?)
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As I was saying....

This last book? No doubt, as she said in an interview, the author made it long because she had so much she needed to set up for the last two books, but I was under-whelmed in all drections. Who were those people and what happened to the real characters?

I couldn't believe it when I got to the end of the book and found out that I'd slogged through 870 pages in 7 hours only to find out that H was not, in fact, the 'hero' of this book, nor were any of the kids. H was just a typical teenager who had to be bailed out of a mess in the end by the adults around him.

Dmbldr's explanation" of what was going on was anticlimactic. The entire book was anticlimactic.

We didn't need almost a thousand pages to tell us that, in the end, it was going to have to be H or the Evil Guy, okay? We all knew that from Day One.

And the reason Evil Guy was out to kill H? Because of a prophecy? How dumb is that when Evil Guy's desperate attempts to get his hands on a copy of the prophecy proves that he doesn't know what it says? For all he knew, it said if Evil Guy killed H, he'd be dead within a year.

The returning characters were mostly out of character and the death was....much like the scenes of H being tortured by the Evil Teacher, completely unnecessary. The last book already proved that Bad Things Can Happen. What did this death do except, along with the Prefect-ization of R and Hmn, turn H's isolation from the world around him into melodrama?

Most of the action and events here actually showed up in the fanfiction already (even as little as I've read of it, about twelve stories, I know that) which says a lot about how creative this book wasn't. The OOT torturing of the main character was also in the most mediocre tradition of fandom.

Oh, there was good stuff in the book, including a couple of excellent new characters, but if we hadn't been assured that this was, in fact, the work of the original author, I'd have assumed it was a bad job of ghosting. The emotional entanglements were handled clumsily when they weren't outright ignored, almost all of the characters were a bit "off" and the story itself...well.... Let's just say I wasn't thrilled.

Looks like number three is going to remain forever and always my favorite.