NOW she FINALLY thinks it's pretty neat!

In the lead-up to the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows this Friday at midnight, Lisa and I started last night watching all of the Harry Potter movies, beginning with Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone. Tonight we spent over two hours watching Chamber of Secrets. And now, only now, is Lisa appreciating something really cool that I did for her five years ago!!

It was about two months before the wedding. She was doing her final exams and I was at Star Wars Celebration II in Indianapolis. I wanted to get her something really special from the trip and also something of a gift for her getting her master's degree.

Well, Lisa and I sort of discovered the Harry Potter books at about the same time and Sorceror's Stone was the last movie we saw in theaters before we got engaged. And one of the guests at Celebration II was Warwick Davis: the fella who played Wicket in Return of the Jedi and who also played Professor Flitwick in the Harry Potter movies. So I had an idea ...

I left the convention center, ran down the street to a B. Dalton's bookstore and bought a hardcover copy of Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone. I then went back to the convention, waited in the autographs line and asked Mr. Davis if he could sign this book for my fiancee. He was delighted to do it, and in gold ink this is what he wrote on the blank page inside the cover:

Lisa
Practice your charms!

Warwick Davis
'Flitwick'

I got back home a few days later, gift-wrapped it and a few days later after she graduated at Georgia I gave it to her.

And Lisa was ... surprisingly unimpressed.

And she's been that way about it until tonight. After the movie she's telling me about how she really likes Dumbledore's line in Sorceror's Stone regarding how we should not "dwell on dreams and forget to live", so she gets the book out of the shelf, she opens it up. And it's like she's seeing Flitwick's signature for the very first time and now she admits that it's a rather neat thing to have and appreciates me for getting it for her. Only five years later.

She'll appreciate it even more in years to come, when we can show it to our kids and tell them that this book was once held by the same Professor Flitwick that they watch in the movies :-)