This week, excitement abounds.

Monday, the R.C. and I caved in and went to see the latest Harry Potter movie. Not because we actually wanted to see it (we've been less-than thrilled with the movie adaptations) but because it's showing at one of our local IMAX theatres and was advertised as 3-D! I love a 3-D experience.

Mostly. This one? Not so much. It's not that I don't have the patience to sit through a movie that's 2 hours and 20 minutes long, because I do, but it has to be a movie I really want to see. I should have thought of that before.

And the 3-D thing? 20 minutes toward the end of the movie. A very truncated fight scene at the Ministry of Magic.

When the lights came up, I popped out of my seat and dashed for the door with a sense of having been released from confinement.

At $13/ticket, I don't recommend the IMAX Potter experience. I didn't really need to see a lot of sweating, teen-aged faces three stories high and I felt like the spectator at a tennis match, swinging my head back-and-forth to try and catch the action happening in different parts of the screen.

Ho-hum.

Yesterday I went with a friend to pick up some Craigslist finds she wanted in nearby Parker, Colorado. First, let me say that Parker has grown a lot since the last time I visited it, 15 or so years ago. It goes to show how clueless I am that I didn't realize it's practically a suburb of Denver now. In fact, we wound up about two miles south of the building where I worked for four years, back around '90.

Neither of us knew precisely where we were going, I have the world's worst sense of direction and am thus unqualified to navigate a turtle across a living room, much less a friend around an unfamiliar town. (There are people who can announce, "I've never been here before" and still navigate you directly to your destination. Those people frighten me.) We squabbled, we sniped at each other, and we enjoyed the occasional bitter silence.

At one point, a plastic piece popped off the open back door of her van and we scurried around in the street, trying to avoid traffic and figure out where it had gone.

Then we went to Target and I availed myself of the bathroom facilities while she bought a shower rod.

Then we went to Whole Foods and ate lunch.

Then she bought fish while I cooed over the Rocky Ford Cantaloupes now available and made plans to come back and buy great armloads later. (I was walking home from Whole Foods and while that's only half a block, half a dozen cantaloupes makes a heavy load.)

A good time was had by all.

As though our dubious friendship hasn't been tested enough for one week, today we're carpooling to Boulder to eat lunch with another friend. Sushi! And she wants to go to some other place she's heard of up there.

I have maps but little faith that today will work out any better than yesterday. (OTOH, yesterday we didn't have a map, so maybe I'm being too pessimistic?) (If I can pull myself together early enough to hit Grease Monkey on the way to her place, maybe I can drive and she'll have to navigate?)

On the Good News front, I got a call back from that agency I applied through a couple of weeks ago. I thought, given the long silence, that I'd been passed over. Turns out that their client had been traveling and only recently became available to review resumes. They loved mine, thought I was fabulous, but overqualified. They thought I'd be bored stiff so--no interview. (I informed the agency that it's been my experience that jobs expand to utilize the capabilities of the people in them.) The agency likes me, though, and wants to keep my resume in case of another opportunity.

It was nice to get a call like that. A sort of affirmation that I am, indeed, an acceptable candidate.