Im Westen nichts Neues

Or, as Remarque's English translators will have it, "All Quiet on the Western Front."

Inki's due date is next Tuesday the 7th, but nothing is happening here yet. We went to see the new Harry Potter movie yesterday, figuring a movie theater would be a great place for her water to break, but we got to sit through the whole movie instead, and I finally got to find out how "Order of the Phoenix" ends.

I had read and enjoyed the first four books, but I hit a wall in "OotP" with the character of Dolores Umbridge when she was torturing Harry in detention with a pen that etched into his skin as he wrote out "I will not tell lies" over and over again in punishment. Inki was reading it to me -- we do that with books we both enjoy -- and I asked her to stop and was so put off by that scene that we never took the book up again and Inki finished it on her own. It wasn't that the scene was the worst thing to happen in the books -- far from it -- but that I couldn't stand the idea of a sadistic teacher getting off on torturing her students like that.

Please, people, for God's sake, if you don't like kids, don't be a teacher. Work for the DMV or something, OK?

So I was keyed up in the theater yesterday when we got to that scene, but I made it through and through some other fairly awful displays of overt sadism by Umbridge, getting madder by the minute, though just as it was at its worst, I turned to Inki and whispered/snarled, "I want this bitch DEAD."

Now, fortunately, I'm past my mental roadblock and got through the first 120 pages of "Half-Blood Prince" last night. We're planning to take "Deathly Hallows" to the hospital to read to each other after the delivery, so I'm going to get through "HBP" as fast as I can in order to be ready for that.

I'll let you know if anything interesting happens here in the meantime, but for now all is quiet in Muggle world.