Release date announced one year ago today!

[jennivirides]

As The Leaky Cauldron has very kindly reminded me, last year on the 
15th of January, Bloomsbury and Scholastic gave us the news we had 
been waiting for for so long: a release date for OotP.

So I was wondering, how did you hear about it? Where were you? What 
did you do? How did you feel (apart from the obvious)?

I remember very vividly, I was having an absolutely manky day. I had 
a stinking cold, and I had just had an exam that went appallingly 
badly (rather like today...). Anyway, I got home, turned on my 
computer and logged onto the Internet. My homepage is always set to 
www.bbc.co.uk, and the first thing I saw was the headline 'RELEASE 
OF POTTER 5 ANNOUNCED'.

I let out a huge squeak, quickly clicked on the link, read the 
story, squeaked again, and promptly went to phone my father, who is 
as big a HP fan as I am, but had been telling me for years that JK 
would never actually write Book 5. So I had to phone him at work to 
gloat, I'm only human. ;)

My second move was, of course, to mark the date with big red letters 
on my calendar.

I then remember feeling at somewhat of a loose end, so I typed the 
words 'Harry Potter' in Google, wondering if there might be a few 
sites I could look at. Ah, how naive I was!

I joined HPfGU about a week later, if I remember correctly, and I've 
been lurking around ever since.

So does anyone else have any memories of that momentous day to share?