Deep, philosophical thoughts about pattern naming...

All right, so I am sitting here, contemplating the names Muggles give to knitting stitch patterns and how they , excuse me, ladies, screw them up so royally all the time. Like how they call "Eye of the Phoenix" stitch "Eye of the Partridge" and how they can't seem to decide when a cable stops being an ear of wheat and becomes stag's horns, not even in the big three volume set I am having to use because Sadie Snidewhoppet's Slytherly Stitch Stash is out of the Library again. Which also reminds me that it is absolutely pathetic to be a grown woman writing books and referring back to your school house. I mean, really, has NOTHING happened to her since graduation?

My aunt and my mother are pathetic in this way and it always makes me cringe. What the heck is an SAT and why on earth do they think anyone cares what they got on theirs back before Voldemort disappeared the first time? I mean, gosh, I think my dad still had his NOSE. How much further back can you go before the Muggles were pressing their test results into clay tablets with little cuneiform sticks?

Anyway, I am fueled in all of this brilliant analysis by peeps, which are a delicious thing made out of marshmallow and finely granulated, dyed sugar, and produced, in this case, in the shape of little chicks. Well, sort of. I think you have to know they are chicks before they look like chicks. My Grandma sends them to me from the US cause we don't have them here. I have a mutilated one floating in my hot cocoa right now. I got the idea from a book I saw in a craft store about how to cook with peeps, and if it had been a reasonable price I would have gotten it, but I thought that almost thirteen dollars was a lot to pay for a book that showed you how to float peeps in hot cocoa...or espresso...and thought these were two different recipes...

I am not entirely forgiven, but they have thought up a way to punish me...

They are making me list every single trip I have ever been on, starting with "Home from St. Mungo's when you were born, Lassie!" and ending with "Hogwarts Express back to Hogwarts after Christmas Holiday."

Then, I have to figure out how much each one would have cost a Muggle, not today, no, but back in the day it happened.

And then, I have to figure out, using the cost of floo powder through the ages, how much each one of those must have cost my parents and so forth...

and THEN I have to come up with some dollar figure, adjusted for inflation, of how much more it would have cost a Muggle to do what I have done than it cost my family. Oh, and I can't even use a Muggle calculator, no, must all be done with a pencil on paper.

I am consoling myself with peeps my Grandma Mary sent me. I love you, Grandma!

Who knew Dad reads my posts....

>.<

Who knew Dad reads my posts?

I am now on a "no-allowance for the rest of your life, young lady, I am making you your mum's slave for the summer and grounding you so hard you are going to need your Uncle Harry and his best broom to resurrect your head far enough for a goblin to kick it in the gutter and if I come up with anything else before you come home on the Hogwart's Express you'll be dealing with that, too."

You try getting a howler from an angry Auror in the Great Hall, not at Breakfast when everyone's half asleep and half the people aren't there, but right smack in the middle of lunch, when it is just teeming with every person on earth you would rather not have hear it. And I suspect he availed himself of Uncle George, too, because it was not just a normal howler; it had little nasty smelling explosions going on and this foul smoke that kind of boiled out of it and come to think of it was pretty Slytherin-worthy, at that.

Mum is just, you know, my mum. I totally never think of her as a Muggle. But it is also a major mistake to make an offhand comment like that to a man who fought the Death Eaters. And about his wife yet. And about your own Mum, even if you never think of her that way.

I. am. so. dead.

I think it must be the Boomslang part...

So the other day, my Muggle friend tries to read my blog and types in "BelladonnaBoomslang.com" instead of the blogspotty thing part. And as usually happens when you go after a domain name that does not really exist, she got a list of other phrases she should try...

About three of which were fit for children our age to see. I forget what she said came right after "Slang."

Seriously, it is my NAME people. You would think the smutmasters of the computer world could get their heads out of the gutter, but NOOOO....

I swear. It is always like this when things are run by Muggles.

What a Whilde Wheek I had

I was over in NY this past week. Dad took us older kids by apparition - he has it down to a science just how far he can apparate with us, and points all picked out, so it only takes an hour or two, even with rest and bathroom breaks, to get over to NY. Of course we get glimpses of just about every island in the North Sea and a bunch of Greenland, Newfoundland, and every other land between here and there. I don't know how he manages it. Mom port-keys with the younger kids, and we always end up there first, even though she has that special port key.

It was a party with our uncle, who is her sortofbutnotexactlybutheywhomindssowhynot brother. We are actually pretty tight with his family. They figured out late, after Aunt Celia, that they were wizards, so they never went to proper wizarding school which means they are absolutely brilliant and even innovative in the areas of magic they chose to specialize in - at least Dad says so - but can still occasionally be gotten by a Hogwarts kid who keeps her eyes open and does something unexpected. They are either totally good sports about it, though, or else pretending to be thick and therefore being even better sports about it...anyway, this uncle likes turning people upside down so one time Freesia got him with Levicorpus, but he just laughed, and after she let him down insisted that she teach him how to do that, "in case my back ever goes out."

There was no springiness happening at all over there - we went to Niagara Falls and there was still a bunch of ice. Oh well, maybe on our next trip.


Now why am I having so much trouble with this project I am making for my spoilee in this interhouse unity thing? Am I not all for interhouse unity? Am I not actually living in a dungeon for the sake of interhouse unity? Then why, in the name of every graduate of Hogwarts who has ever passed the veil, did I have to frog the 3/4 done thing and pick it back up? Why can I not count to 120 without getting confused?

I am gonna go rip all my green hair out...

Red is for Gryffindor, and Green is for Slytherin...

(The only way poor Belladonna can keep herself straightened out this term with being in two places at once is to blog Gryffindor in Red and Slytherin in Green. Prefects, head girls and other powers that be, please look for your correct color...)

So, I have discovered that feet are something like eyes. that is, we can't do much more about them than Muggles can. I've got special padding for the inside of my shoes now, which means that most of my shoes don't fit even without socks. Dad says he'll charm them in the morning and I should be greatful I have feet at all. Which I really have to take, coming from him... But I am starting to fear that if I ever want to wear handknit socks again, I might have to wear WIZARD shoes...sob...

I am really starting to worry not only about Lavender Acherly, but about The entire school. Has NO ONE noticed the girl is gone? Doesn't ANYONE remember about Bertha Jawkins and what it meant when she went missing? One of dad's trainees got sent along with the usual law and order wizards because it wasn't clear to anyone just what Rufus was up to, but it seems like mostly what he was up to, so far as they could TELL, was running up gambling debts. I am sure that means we will see more of him in the papers in the future, because it always ends up these fools play more than they can pay, but he says he hasn't seen Lavender and my Dad believes him.

It turns out Dad has known since the beginning of term that she was missing - Uncle Neville told him.No flies on Uncle Neville. He's been sitting on his hands cause mom says she can already float around as well as she wants to, thank you very much, and says he knows what will happen if he tries to leave her undefended, whatever that means. She only says it when she is really worried that he will go off and start Auror-ing again, which is only about once a week. Every time she says it though, it quiets him right down. It never seems to lose its effect. And he'd be just as happy with us all home, under his roof, where he can see us, but as mom pointed out, not everyone at Hogwarts ends up locked in his or her own truck and that really happened in the garden, anyway. Which I think would get her nowhere except that he says she disappeared after term ended, not from the castle -well duh, I could have told him that.

Only, what if it wasn't her???

This has not been a good day

And so I will blog quickly, and to the point.

1. I am getting blogoschizosomethingo from trying to figure out how to blog myself as Gryffindor and Slytherin at the same time.

2. Ok, so my prank involved making a snow dragon attack Uncle Ron, and having him blame it on Uncle George. Freesia heard about it and was impressed enough to come find me.

"It wasn't me, so it had to be you. Good one!"

"He really blamed it on George?"

"Yes. For once he had no reason to blame it on Uncle Fred."

"Yeah, why does he ever blame anything on Uncle Fred? He died so long ago."

"Well, it is a long story."

And that was all I could get out of her, but she was quite chuffed.

Apparantly Uncle Ron never figured out that if you happen to go about halfway up the Astronomy tower, and lean out of just the right window, just the right way, you can sort of get a line of site to right in front of the shop down there in Hogsmeade. So I was able to do it from here, and of course he doesn't suspect me. What surprises is that Uncle George has not been up here asking how I did it. He seems to have spent more time up to shenanigans than anyone at Hogwarts, ever, except for Uncle Fred, so I am surprised he doesn't know about that window.

Then again, he may be planning some revenge...