Well, had my third class of Charms today and
the professor talked about wands. I really don’t know why wand movements
weren’t explained in the first lesson though. You know, for those who wouldn’t
have read the textbook before school started or after the first lesson. Anyways
we were given some readings again, I’ve pretty much read both textbooks in the
last two weeks (I was curious and they were quite interesting), I’ll just skim
through the chapters to make sure I haven’t forgotten something important.

The chapter about wands in Quintessential Magic reminded me that I
need to do some research to see what the properties of my wand are. It can’t
hurt to know, right?

So, the first spell we had to learn and
practice this week was the Unlocking Charm, Alohomora. Isn’t it weird that it’s
actually pronounced “a-LOH-ha-MOR-ah”.
I would have thought it was “a-LOH-ho-MOR-ah”.
But what do I know! Getting the intonation right needed practice. And I used
the same technique as with the Wingardium Leviosa. The wand movement (a
backward S curving up at the end) wasn’t too hard to get. And while the timing
needed a couple of tries to work out, it was an easy enough spell. To practice,
I locked the bathroom door (with me inside, can you imagine if I locked myself
out of the bathroom and wasn’t able to unlock it? Though I guess it would
provide enough motivation to get the Charm right…) and practice it on the door.
muggle locks are supposed to be the easiest to unlock and until I learn how to
lock something magically, it’s all I have. Anyways, the spell worked just fine
and after a couple of successful attempts, I had enough. This will be a really
useful spell to know next time I lock myself out of the car… assuming me doing
magic on the car’s door won’t make it explode. Hmmm I’ll have to go to the car
cemetery and try it on one of their cars first. I just finished paying mine, so
no way am I going to make it explode accidentally!

The last homework spell was the Mending Charm,
Reparo. This is so going to be useful (I tend to be a bit clumsy and I have 3
mischievous part-kneazle cats) and I can already think of a good dozen things
that need to be repaired. My main difficulty was to put the intonation. I had a
tendency to say “REH-pah-roh” instead of “reh-PAH-roh”, so I had to work on
that while cutting my pattern for my latest stained glass project. It was
actually harder than you would think to rewire my brain to put the emphasis on
the “PAH”. Maybe because in French, the emphasis of the word “Réparer” is actually on the
“Ré”. Even with plenty
of practice I still have to think before saying that spell. I guess 1000
repetitions won’t beat a decade of it… I finally decided to try adding the wand
movement, an inward and downward pointed spiral. But first I had to get
something to fix. I was sitting at my desk and I could see one area that was
chipped (I think that was from an accident with scissors) and another that had
been damaged by crazy-glue. So I tried the chipped area first. Took a couple of
tries since at first I was concentrating too much on properly saying the
incantation to be focused on what I was trying to achieve. So I took the time
to visualize the plain smooth surface of the desk and tried again and it worked
(it was a very small chip). So I tried on the other damaged area. It took more
than one use of the spell but it did work. This week, I am so going through the
house and repairing everything I can! Holes in the walls left by the previous
owner, that little glass box my dad brought back from Greece (I can’t even
remember how the cover got broken, it’s fixed with glue right now), chipped
cups, damaged bookshelves (from all the moving around), heck even damaged books!
My wand and I are going to get a lot of practice now that I know that spell!
This is so AWESOME!!!