What a Life!

We just finished watching The Sound of Music. We as in me (mostly), Ben and Joey. This was inspired in part by one of my knitting buddies, Liz, and her upcoming trip to Germany which includs a trip to Salzburg where they have a Sound of Music tour. I also was planning to join Netflix so maybe we’d watch some movies around here more often.

We have a video store in town. Ownership changed, though, and though the new guy put things in alphabetical order among genres rather than in order by release date, he’s kind of a smart alec so he’s not very fun to see when you go to pick out a video. Furthermore, the new releases are always gone by the time we get there, and we don’t keep up enough with what’s out there to know what might be worth seeing.

They did a special on Netflix a couple weeks ago on 60 Minutes (I think) about how they send you a movie the day after you request it, how shipping is for free, and how (this is the good part) they recommend movies you might like based on the ones you rent. Now that’s an idea!

So I signed up last week and added some movies to our queue (where you list the movies you want to see in the order you want to see them so they know what to send you as soon as you return the one you have). Of course, they’re all movies that I want to see. Like the Sound of Music. It’s such a wonderful movie!

I told Steve I was going to sign up a couple weeks before I actually did it, and he thought it was a good idea. You should have seen the look on his face when we got our first movie and it was the Sound of Music. He said, “You should have requested something I’d like to see too and we could have watched a movie together this weekend.” I told him he was welcome to watch the Sound of Music with me, but he declined, which is why we watched it today while he was at work.

The neat thing is, when they do the previews at the beginning of a movie (my favorite part), you can make note of the ones that look good and go add them to your queue as soon as the movie is over. I just added Oklahoma to our cue. I can hardly wait to see the look on Steve’s face when that arrives.

When I lived in Maryland, I loved watching Silver Screen on public tv on Saturday nights where they’d feature black-and-white (and sometimes color) classics. I love watching classic movies. They’re so much easier to follow along with – I seem to get lost half the time when I watch current selections.

One more great internet invention…paperbackswap.com. You can list paperbacks that you have but don’t want to keep around anymore, and people who want to read them will request them. I went through my books and found about two shelves worth of books I’d read and don’t care to read again, books I hated reading and don’t want to be reminded of, books I thought I would want to read but no longer want to, and books I tried to read but just couldn’t get into. Yes, that’s four categories of guilt.

You have to pay the postage to send the person the book, but for each book you send, you get to request a book that someone else is offering and they pay the postage to send it to you. The only downside is that the two books I requested didn’t look very nice when I received them. I am very careful with my books so they generally still look new after I’ve finished reading them. To me, reading a beat-up book is like eating off a dirty dish so I doubt I’ll be requesting many books.

I know I could just donate the books to the library or something. I’ve gone around to used bookstores in town before and gotten rid of books. But the used bookstores didn’t want all of my books, and the library took them, but maybe they didn’t want them either. I feel guilty handing off rejects like that.

But when someone actually requests a book you have sitting on your shelf that’s in one of those guilt categories, it feels so good to get rid of it. I mean, it’s great to not have it anymore – it’s really great to send it to someone who actually wants to have it. So it is with great joy that I pay $1.59 to send my books to someone else one at a time.

And getting rid of books I don’t want to read has inspired more reading of the books I do want to read. I finished reading Vinegar Hill and am now in the midst of Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Yes, that would be my “February book.” I’m ahead of schedule. Maybe I should change my goal and make it two books per month. Or maybe I should start working on some of my other goals…like exercise.

Okay, enough for now. I need to return that movie so I can get another one. Cheers!