This is the photo for my Blogger profile, from my time in Baltic Europe.

In over ten years of working with the traveling public, I have learned a few things. For example, there are two types of people who lose their passports: Americans, and everyone else.

Okay, not really. But there are two types: the kind who wait at least 24 hours before reporting their passports lost or stolen - which usually adds up to six hours before they want to go to the airport; and the kind who call up FRANTIC the minute they realize they can't find The Precious - which usually means they will be in a frenzy until their replacements can be secured. Then they will recover the old ones.

Halley Update: He is nine months old today. He crawls and can pull himself up to a standing position. This is one of his favorite pastimes. His hair is the color of Gold from the Crayola "Big Box" of 64 colors, and his eyes are like mahogany. He babbles with great enthusiasm. He has one tooth that has properly broken the surface of his lower gums, like Sgt. Snorkel.
He weighs 17 pounds and is 27 and a quarter inches long (fifth percentile and about 25th, respectively). He eats all sorts of pureed stuff and has little to no interest in Cheerios. He also likes watching Dora and Diego with his big sister - heaven help me.
Oh, and he is just about the cutest thing imaginable. I have several corroborating sources. Trust me.

Ooops, I read it again. I picked up HP7 again. I've also been plugging away at Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which I started a month ago. Then two nights ago I watched The Prestige, which has insinuated itself into my dreams, mingling with Potter. I woke up the other morning thinking I had just watched the most horribly lame HP movie ever.
And my husband, bless his heart, is reading The Mists of Avalon (one of my favorite books of all time).
So all of this is to say that I am English-magicked-out at the moment.
As an antidote, I periodically pick up the Mayflower history that my brother sent me for my birthday. It's a paperback, conveniently sized for reading while nursing a wriggly baby. All the other books mentioned above are in hardcover and none is under 600 pages.
I'm also working my butt off at the office - it's high season for tourism, and the Island is abuzz with all sorts of traffic. And all my Islander colleagues ask the same question, "Why call it 'Tourist Season' if we're not allowed to shoot them?"

Still recovering from HP7, which I devoured within the first 24 hours of purchase. I pretty much read from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. straight. I am in awe of those who have the discipline to put it down between chapters.
I don't think I'm letting out any spoilers when I say that I found the outcome satisfactory. But dang, Ms. Rowling, that is one wicked gangsta body count.

Not Ready For Prime Time. My husband had a stunned-bunny look on his face the other day. "You should know," he said in a very calmly modulated voice, "that our daughter has told me that she has to be married soon."

Bear in mind that Daddy would sooner give Matsuzaka away to the Yankees for free than admit that someday his daughter might go on a date. The notion of her getting married is simply too awful to imagine.

Then our little girl came up to me and announced, "Mommy, I have to be married soon." At first I thought I'd woken up on the wrong side of the 15th Century. Then I asked her who she planned to marry. She had to think about that for a minute, then she said, "Swiper."

So my two-year-old plans to marry an animated kleptomaniac fox. I can handle that.

Oh, by the way, "Halley" has started scoot-crawling. He can sit up unassisted too. And he giggles like the goat in the AFLAC commercials.

Waiting, waiting, waiting... Once it became clear that I would not see HP&tDH for several days, I picked up my paperback of Book One for a fix. It helps, but it also reminds me that I'm jonesing for a children's book. So to bide my time, and remind me that I'm a grownup, I've picked up the copy of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell my sister-in-law gave me. I am blessed with abundantly cool sisters-in-law.

Deep down I know I did the right thing, establishing domestic tranquility and all that on Friday evening. But I really really really wanted to go downtown, get that ruddy book, and Twitter or phone my peeps back home with "Chapter One..., neener neener." I would have stayed up all night reading and been a wreck the next day.

Now you know that you're getting old when staying up all night and being a useless pile of junk the next day involves reading a book rather than ingesting recreational chemicals.

ARRRRGGGGGGH!!!!!
The four most miserable words in the English language are "SOLD OUT - Pre-Orders Only".

Okay, seriously. I am a reasonable person. I know that there are hundreds of millions of people on this earth in more dire conditions than this. And I complain about closet mildew and the water running out and insects the size of Shetland ponies, but I tell myself that these are blessings compared to the life I could be living.

Then this happens.

I could have had one of these books several hours before the rest of my family. The Island's closest-thing-to-a-metropolis had a street fair launch party, kicking off at midnight London time (i.e. while it's still daylight here Friday night). I wanted to go. But nooooooooooooooooo, I decided I was going to act my age.

I stayed at home, put the kids to bed, cleaned the kitchen, did a load of laundry, took the box fan apart to scrub and soak the mildew off of it, and got a good night's sleep. The next morning, I dropped off a donation at the hospital board's charity shop (is this not good karma, I ask you?!?!?) and went to my morning appointment.

And when I got downtown at 11 a.m. Saturday morning, every book that wasn't spoken for was sold. Gone. Nada. Zilch. Niente. Bupkes.

Who runs the bookstores on this lump of rock anyway?

I even saw people on the street walking around with their copies, and only refrained from jumping them because they had the kids with them.

So I suppose I can only blame myself for not having the presence of mind to pre-order the thing, for expecting that there would be copies aplenty of the most anticipated book of the year, and not adapting my mindset sufficiently to Island Mode.

And I should get a grip on myself, because it is just a book - and one written for people one-third my age - and I will get a copy eventually.

But I am compelled to maintain my media blackout for at least another week. And the last two e-mails that my mom sent me had "Harry Potter" in the title, so I don't dare click on them. (Sorry Mom, better call me if it's important.)

And I repeat, anyone who spoils this book for me meets a nasty fate: I will lock you in the water tank under my house. You will either drown, die of thirst, or be devoured by something with six legs and no conscience. All are warned.

Echoing my Big Brother here: I am jumping on the Hogwarts Express tomorrow, come hell or high water or horcruxes. I am entering a media blackout for the next 72 hours. Anyone who even dreams about putting a spoiler in my path had better wake up and apologize. Then they'd best run for cover before I open a can of Sectumsempra on their sorry behinds.

I fully realize that I should know better. I am closer to 40 than to 30. But deep down, (again, borrowing my bro's words) I am just two thirteen-year-olds and a twelve-year-old.

Even the mediocrity of Movie Five can not kill the buzz of giddy anticipation. See you all at the Burrow.

Happy Birthday to Me! I took the afternoon off work yesterday to take in a matinee of the new Harry Potter movie, because I am not really almost 40, I'm two thirteen-year-olds and a twelve-year-old.
This is the theatre where we went to see "The Departed" last fall, and the film broke about ten minutes before the end. So this place is just full of bad karma, but when there are four theatres on the entire island you can't be picky.
So of course it makes perfect sense that my skiving buzz got killed when we went to pick up Gigi from school, and her teacher said, "We've been trying to call you since 3:00; she has a fever, we've sent four other kids home today with temperatures."
None of this surprises me, of course, because the last time I swore I was taking a "mental health" day off, both kids got sick. I suppose this time the only reason Halley got off lucky was that I spent the first half of the day at work.

How did I spend July 4th? Eating red meat and watching a Spielberg flick about robots beating the crap out of each other. Sounds appropriate enough...

Best Headline This Year.

I'm going to be up half the night giggling over the concept of "too ignorant to be Canadian."

Really, it's going to take Dick Cheney getting his nipple bitten off by a beaver to top that one.

Our fearful trip is done, and I have fallen on the deck, cold and dead. As soon as I've recovered, you get the recap.

You know it's time for a vacation when...
Three nights in a row, you catch yourself just shy of locking your home computer with Ctrl-Alt-Del.

Vacation, gotta get away...
People ask, "where do you go for vacation if you live on The Island?"
Well, so far, I haven't. We've been here just shy of a year, during which we've moved in, lived through two hurricanes, had a baby, taken a painfully short maternity leave, and waged asymmetrical warfare against the resident insect life. My husband left The Island for all of 48 hours for a funeral two months ago.
So now we're taking a trip. I won't call it a vacation. We're flying to New England, where we will go to the woods to live deliberately with my in-laws -- including my husband's Euro-grandparents, with whom I do not share a common language. They seem to like me well enough; but last time we visited them, I broke one of Oma's plates; and when they visited us in the Baltics, Oma broke her clavicle. If we get through a visit together on neutral territory with nothing fractured, I will consider it a big win.
Anyway, at the end of this week, Gigi plays flower girl at Uncle Mikey's wedding. Then we'll make a trek down the coast. I used to love road trips, before they involved minivans and a matching set of preschoolers. This is undiscovered country: here be dragons. Or freakish purple dinosaurs. If only one of us drives, the other one can drink, right?
We'll stop at various midAtlantic points, until we reach the next wedding, my cousin's.
I remember this cousin as a baby. I held him up to my grandmother's apartment door and taught him how the locks worked. The kid could probably wipe the walls with me at chess by age five. He's now approaching the quarter-century mark and will probably be lending Bill Gates money before he's forty. (At the very least, he could kick his @$$ at bridge.) I say this out of admiration, not jealousy. I can not begrudge him his good fortune in avoiding our common ancestry's disastrous math genes.
But I digress. I'm going to be doing that a lot over the next ten days.
And I probably won't have regular access to the internet. See that whole "live deliberately" bit above.
So by the time we get back to The Island, I will probably need a vacation desperately. And I'll be back to square one, where people say to me, "Oh sure, you need a vacation - Duh! You live on The Island!!!"
Oh fate, how you mock me.

Potty Training Vignettes:
My husband looks bewildered. He says, "I've just been handed a piece of poo wrapped in tissue."

I'm too busy laughing to ask whether there was a card.

So it turns out that "Bastin pheromones" should really be rendered "Bahstahn" pheromones. My correspondent was referring to the fact that I married into Red Sox Nation, where people "pahk theah cahs". He seems to believe that I am unduly influenced by an atmosphere redolent with RSN vapors. No, dearie, it's not pheromones; that's the smell of Nine Games Up.

The <&*^%$> dryer is electric.

So how have I found an hour just now for blogging? In fact, I am hiding from my children, who are howling in stereo. At six-months-and-change, The Boy is both teething and reluctant to fall asleep without being nursed into dreamy oblivion. Gigi, at this moment, appears to be having a Night Terror. Google it yourself, I'm too tired to hyperlink. Wikipedia has a good article too.
Our little angels have set aside any latent sibling rivalry in favor of solid tag-team relay work: The Boy is home from the hospital, sleeping without sound effects, and back in school, so it's Gigi's turn to have a fever. I blame the fever for precipitating this current episode. I went in to check on her about 30 minutes ago, and she not-quite-woke-up and started pitching a fit. Think about reel one of the Exorcist, minus puke.
So while the kids wear themselves down, I have to stay away - but close enough that I can tell whether they are in any real danger. So I can't avoid the screaming, and I can't quite tune it out.
Anyone with kindly suggestions about coping with this situation without locking anyone in a closet, imbibing Night Train by the case, or violating a Commandment, drop me a line at purplescareblog@gmail.com. I'm going to go fold some laundry, see if sticking my head in the dryer gives any comfort.