Recently in travel Category

I'm home after a weekend in Colorado, during which Cheryl, Ben and I did the following things:

• White-water rafted
• Went to a rodeo
• Slid down a mountain
• Hiked up a mountain (Ben also hiked down)
• Swam
• Scrabbled
• Slept a lot
• Played minigolf
• Drank wine
• Watched Zoolander
• Laughed
• Read
• Listened to a lot of Elvis
• Swam
• Yee-hawed
• Ate loads
• Relaxed

It was this very odd combination of being very active and yet also very calm. Though we were fatigued and sore, the lack of Internet, schedules, alarm clocks and obligations - and presence of crisp (though very thin) mountain air - made for the kind of restful weekend you just don't get in many places.

And then there was also the hot whitewater rafting instructor. Um. He made things better, too.

Pics soon (hot instructor included).

Wow, there are a lot of you here today.

For those of you who don't come through Leaky, read the last few posts and then come back and you'll know what I'm talking about.

It has been a long day, and it's not through yet. The phone is now off, so I can write my story for work and go home and find a cold compress for my head. The phone has been ringing like it is its job (well, it is its job), the e-mails are overflowing, the comments and posts and LJ posts and...and so much more...I knew it would be a day of overwhelming, and I tried to prepare myself for it, but I could not.

I don't really know what to say here. This is the culmination of more than four years of work. I mean, I even dare to hope it's not the actual culmination, but at THIS point, it is. How do you deal with something like that?

I think back to how I got into this fandom - Emily and Rebecca and Teri, that's how. I met them on a message board just when I was about to give up on finding intelligent, mature fans. They're the ones who sucked me in and are wholly responsible for everything that happened after that. God, that's when I really didn't even know that the wand-order mistake had been noticed by anyone but me. LOL! Anyway, I still love them, and still talk to them all, and that's just so special. I actually spoke to Emily on the phone today, as she was someone who has been so sure, for so long, that this would happen (OK, I know many of you were, but she's been particularly supportive, not that I don't appreciate everyone's confidence), that I needed to bust out about it with her. I still have so many phone calls to make. I feel like I've won Academy award - it's a day of so much concentrated love and appreciation, both pouring in and out, that it's depleting me fully.

And outside of all that, I've gotten, today, a marriage proposal, a date request, and a random call, I still don't know from whom, using the relay service that hearing-impaired people use, to tell me that they were Jo, and they were just kidding, and I can't come to England after all, and that they had to go and call Emerson and tell him, too. I just lauuughed and lauuughed.

My cheeks hurt from grinning, my eyes hurt from reading, my feet hurt from yesterday's heels, my stomach hurts from working out (hence the laughing is painful), I have not slept more than 45 minutes, I have a story to write about a cemetery cleanup (yeah, talk about the opposite end of the spectrum), and if someone offered me a pillow, I might not wake up until Tuesday.

But life? Oh, god. It's so good.

Mike (the roommate one) gave me this great program called "Reunion 8," which allows me to make my family tree. It is awesome. It has spaces for everything; it's like a reporting device for each member of my family, and it's going to give me an excuse to sit down with my grandmother and talk about the history of my family. We need to get this down, now, while we can. My mother and I are going to sit together and work on it, too. Because on top of work, Leaky, the charity drive, film features for IGN, this site and the new blog I want to start, I need a project. I mean, really. I'm a slacker. My friend Sam looked at me last night after I had told him my idea for this new blog and he said, "You do realize you're one person, right?" I said, "No!"

But, back to London!

Back home from the DVD party, I conveyed to John my "I'm tired but I need to update TLC or I NEVER WILL"ness, and so we settled in, he on his comp and me on mine (wahoo for wireless Internet), coffee well in hand.

WELL in hand. Coffee. Have I mentioned how much coffee I drank in England? Every time I even thought to myself, "coffee's getting low," John appeared, like my pusher, a new steaming cup in one hand and his cigarette in the other. He would swap cups and disappear downstairs to put the other in the sink, leaving me thinking, "Hm. I could get used to this." I even have my own little sweeteners that sit in the kitchen waiting for me.

We probably could have beaten sunrise had we shut up. But no. We talked ourselves hoarse. And at 6 a.m., when John gave up on me and went to bed, I was just finishing my pictures and starting to write up my party report. When I crawled into bed, having posted it and reposted it four times to fix errors and the like, it was 7:10. I had to be up at 8:15.

For the second day in a row, Eve came into the room, nudged me awake and left coffee by my bedside, and for the second day in a row all I could do was make a weird grunting noise. I had to be up at 8:15 and out by 9:15 to be ready in time to catch the car with T and Jamie to go to the studio. I think I resembled a drunken bat, the way I walked into walls and stumbled into the shower, blindly threw clothes over my body, raked a brush through my hair, slapped on makeup, threw earrings into my ears as if they were darts, grabbed my purse and, in the first burst of energy, ran out the door because I was very nearly late.

Our first stop wasn't the actual studio, it was a TV studio where Jamie, Tom and Josh were filming a live morning interview to promote the DVD. I sleepwalked my way into the green room and fumbled around for coffee. Once there was caffeine, life got better. We were there about an hour before the interview, just joshing around. I had been nagging Jamie to give me a dance demonstration since I arrived in London (I suggested the middle of the party but Jamie just blushed and said "later") and in the freezing London morning, on a balcony where we went so Theresa could smoke and Jamie could get air, me with no coat and ten feet from a railing a hundred feet up, I got one.

Jamie is a better dancer than I am, and I took lessons most of my life. He is lighter on his feet. He spun me around and I stepped on my own foot, and when he picked me up I slammed down into the concrete like Keanu in his first attempt at jumping in The Matrix, but he didn't break stride. Jamie must be twice my size but he has six times as much grace. A lot of people have been marveling that someone as big as he is doesn't lumber around like an oaf, but I don't quite agree with them. At first thought it sounds odd, but it makes perfect sense when you watch, and I don' t know why that is, especially when this is the same person who, later in the morning, was using me as a human battering ram with which he tried to knock down Theresa (his mum, often I'll refer to her as "T"), Tom and Josh all in one go.

Once the interview was done we piled into another car to go to Leavesden, popped the Prisoner of Azkaban DVD into my computer and had a look. I was awake now. Eyes not remotely close to closing. Jamie and I surfed through the interviews and completely gave up when it came to trying to chase Cadogan around the castle. Whatever, man.

The week before this, I was on a proper studio tour with WB, which I will write about at length when the time comes. This time, I spent the day in Jamie's room and watching him practice dancing, which was delightful. I can't say more other than it is FREEZING cold in that studio, and that I had a ball watching them dance. T said to me that now I see how boring their lives are; there's tutoring, and lunch, and some practice, and maybe some days some filming. I still think it's great, and loved being there, and loved soaking it all in, that I was standing in the place where these films get made, and it's beyond my normal perception of cool.

Before I continue it's important to know that when Jamie and his family came here in September, we stayed in my parents' house and also the house they built in NJ. Now, it should be mentioned that real estate in both places is a lot less expensive than in London, where Jamie, John and T live. I looked at some real estate magazines while I was there and was floored. But the houses are wider, roomier, and one's on the water. Jamie has decided that ths is proof that my family is mafioso. His perception wasn't altered when we went to a family barbecue and my cousin's license plates were personalized, everyone paid obvious respect to my grandmother (my nonna, it must be said, looks every bit the matriarch she is), and my cousin Alfred indulged Jamie by saying "Fugettaboutit!" as often as possible. Yeah, that was it. That, and that my family runs a little bakery in Toms River was enough for him. He is convinced it's all a big ruse, and all my extravagant arguments against that notion have done are convince him that I just don't know that my family is mafia, and that I'll be sat down and told all when I'm 30, as a birthday present.

So, not only did Jamie start to think this, he decided others should think it, too. According to various family reports, the first thing he did when he got back to the set was sit all his friends down and tell them all about the mafia family he met and how Melissa, who runs the Leaky Cauldron, is a mafiosette.

The cast of Harry Potter now thinks I'm a mobster. Thanks, Jam.

So, I and my family find this hilarious and we make a lot of jokes back and forth about it, and I told everyone at Thanksgiving and they were crying with mirth. But when I sat down for lunch that day on the set, and Matthew Lewis sat down across from us, I had sort of forgotten about it. Until Jamie leaned over and whispered something to Matt, and all of a sudden I was beseiged with questions about life a la Anelli. What's my dad's last name? Anelli, I said. Oh, so it's Don Anelli, then, Matt said. I just cracked up and threw up my hands. "Yes," I said. "That's it, I'm just going to say yes, because nothing I say otherwise is going to convince you and at least I'll get some respect."

(I also explained that instead of Don Anelli, since my father is the patriarch he'd more likely be called Il Signore degli Anelli, which conveniently enough means The Lord of the Rings as well. So, my dad is not only The Godfather, he's Sauron. Accomplished guy.)

(And it must be said, for the record, that no, not a chance that we are mafia. First of all, many things would be easier if we were - and some considerably harder, like sleeping at night. Second, they don't make people who are as honest and hard-working as my father, not anymore. So, knowing this sort of makes the whole thing funnier, at least to me. Back to our regularly scheduled program now.)

Then poor little Tolger comes over. Tolger, who plays Harry's stunt double. Matt looks up at him.

"Hey, Tolger, you ever meet mafia?"

Tolger looks utterly confused. "No."

Matt makes a meaningful head guesture toward me. Tolger's eyes bug out. "Really?" he asks.

"Nooo," I said.

"Yes, yes, she's mafia, don't listen!" says Jamie, and Matt starts echoing the same.

Matt's face grew sober. "Tolger, you didn't bow. You have to bow."

And little adorable Tolger makes a stilted half bow, as if fighting against someone pulling the back of his shirt, while I'm laughing so hard my cheeks are going to burn right off my face. I said, "That's it, now I'm going to just say that I am mafia, because I'll get all the interviews I want!"

More soon!