Meeting Stephenie Meyer
First off was the Stephenie Meyer (author of the wonderful Twilight series) event Kellyn & I attended at Torrance High School. She is on a tour doing talks & signings for her new novel, The Host. The event was starting at 6:30pm, with doors opening at 5:00pm, so Kellyn and I decided to arrive a little early. We arrived at about 4:30pm and were already #s 291 and 292 in line. After two hours of chatting and waiting, Stephenie came out and talked for about twenty minutes. She answered some questions about The Host (my favorite question was "Why cheetos?"), answered some about Twilight, and then the signing began. She was personalizing our Host books, so to make it easy, we had to place a post-it with our name on it on the book. So this is how my meeting Stephenie Meyer went:
Stephenie: opens the book and reads my name, then looks up, smiles, and says "Hi Jane. I love that name."
Me: (nervous, not really sure what to say) "Thanks"
Stephenie: "Do you relate to Jane in the book at all?"
Me: (nervous, can't believe she's still talking to me, and still not really sure what to say!) "Haha, no"
Stephenie:(jokingly) "So, you don't really like to make people feel pain?"
Me: (oh my gosh, she's still talking to me!) "Haha, no not really"
Kellyn: (talking about me) She's converted our whole office into reading your books
Stephenie: "Oh, so you're the dealer there, huh?"
Me: (nervously) "Yeah"
Oh my goodness, I was tongue tied and couldn't say more than a few words to the woman--what is wrong with me?!? LOL. In my imagination, if I were to have a short conversation with her, I would've at least said something witty. Oh well, guess I can't be witty under pressure...The part when she called me "The Dealer" was so funny, because a couple of friends have compared reading the Twilight series to using drugs. (I think Anitza once said "Jane, if you were a drug dealer, I'd be dead." I'm not a drug dealer, but I'm a Twilight dealer, which can be just as addicting =P) So we left with our newly signed books (Kellyn & I both got our copies of The Host and Twilight signed) at about 8:20pm. There were probably about 1000 people at the event, so I'm not sure how late those poor people had to stay until they got their books signed. And poor Stephenie, having to write her name over and over again a few thousand times. She had a mountain of sharpies right next to her, so I wonder how many of them she actually went through. All in all, it was a very fun event and extremely exciting to meet one of my favorite authors. Yay!
-Kellyn & I at the event (At first, they were allowing pictures with no flash to be taken, so we took this self portrait. But they changed their minds shortly after this was taken, and NO pictures were allowed anymore, so I couldn't get any during her talk)Grunion Run
Later that night, my nerdy bio friends and I went on another grunion run. Although the grunion will still be coming around the next few months, this was the last official night for the Grunion Greeters research. This time, our monitoring time was 10:45pm-12:45am. Since we didn't see a single thing the last time we went out, we were *hoping* to see something, anything this time, even if it was one little scout. After roaming up and down the beach for about 45 minutes, we finally saw some grunion! At first, a handful at a time were coming up. We counted about 50. Then the numbers started increasing into the hundreds. And kept increasing. And increasing. There were thousands! The length of the beach was eventually covered in the little silvery fish--the females digging their back ends into the sand and laying their eggs, and the males flopping around and fertilizing the eggs. IT. WAS. AWESOME. We were all so giddy, running up and down the beach to look at all of them--it was the first run that Alicia, Emily & I have ever seen, and the biggest run that Ann & Shannon have ever seen, so it was a pretty exciting thing for all of us. By the end of our monitoring time, the run had lasted for over an hour, and they were still on the beach when we left.
-This is what it looks like, but imagine the length of beach like this.
-Me, Emily, Alicia, Ann & Shannon with the grunions behind us. We are holding up our five fingers because this run was rated a W-5 (for our monitoring, we have to rate the runs from a W-0 to a W-5, five being the ultimate of the grunion runs. And that's what we saw, the big kahuna of runs.)
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