Musings

Retraction

So it looks like enough people wrote in and complained to Netflix to make them change their mind. If you have Netflix you already know that several weeks ago they sent out an email saying,

We wanted to let you know we will be eliminating Profiles, the feature that allowed you to set up separate DVD Queues under one account, effective September 1, 2008.

Each additional Profile Queue will be unavailable after September 1, 2008. Before then, we recommend you consolidate any of your Profile Queues to your main account Queue or print them out.

While it may be disappointing to see Profiles go away, this change will help us continue to improve the Netflix website for all our customers.

And they included contact information if you had any questions for them. I know that this first email created a lot of anger at our house. Chris and I have one account that we split up into two profiles. We have very different taste in movies, we cross over a fair amount but our "I'm home alone and going to watch movies all day" selections are vastly different. Plus Chris tends to keep movies for months at a time before finishing them. I want my queue to move a lot faster than that. If I can get the system down right then I can have one in the mail while I am watching the other. Well it seems that enough people felt similarly peeved and so I got this email today,

You spoke, and we listened. We are keeping Profiles. Thank you for all the calls and emails telling us how important Profiles are.

We are sorry for any inconvenience we may have caused. We hope the next time you hear from us we will delight, and not disappoint, you.

-Your friends at Netflix

This email feels like a very polite letter written to some very angry customers. Well I am glad that they are keeping the profiles. It is such a great feature. I guess they just didn't realize how much people loved it until they tried to take it away.

Thank you Netflix. I appreciate you listening.

Hot today

Yesterday was the first really hot day we have had here. Hot but gorgeous. Today it is a whopping 85 degrees. I know to most of you reading this that is nothing. Since being here I have gotten use to the mild weather and forgotten how much hot weather can make you cranky and take the life out of you. There is a bit of a breeze so if you can open the right windows and not let into too much sun it is pleasant in the house. Chris has been cleaning up the basement this weekend; making himself a computer lab down there. It is really nice and cool down there. I am almost jealous. The upstairs is nice because the breeze blows through really nicely. Lola was pretty hot last night but we managed to get the room really cool when we went to sleep.

I suppose it is about time that it got hot here. The 4th of July is next weekend. It is hard to believe we are so far into summer already.

There is a beer fest here next weekend at the Seattle Center. I asked Chris if he still wanted to go and he just gave me a look. Why did I even ask? Beer? Yes! This festival allows dogs and no babies, Lola isn't crowd savvy enough yet so she will probably have to stay home. I will be there with my parasol trying to stay cool and looking for the gyro cart while Chris samples the beers. I can't remember the last time I did anything on the 4th so it will be fun to be festive this year.

I am going to sit right here drinking my lemon ginger ice tea, heavy on the ice and reading my Stephen King book trying not to move too much.

Sex and the City: The Movie

The wives of some of Chris's friends out here asked me to go to see Sex and the City with them last week. Now I haven't thought about this show in a long time. I was excited to hang out with the girls but unsure of the movie choice.

 

 

The movie started off a little rough, recapping all that had happened at the end of the series and in the three years since (the last episode and the movie). But after the necessary recap it felt just like old times. I had no idea how nice it would be to see all those familiar faces on the screen again.

 

 

I will spare you the replay of the movie. Chris had to endure my 30 min version the next day.

The only problem I had with the movie was Jennifer Hudson. She comes in somewhere in the early middle of the movie and just takes a big bad acting shit all over the movie. (Pardon my bluntness) So I chose to ignore her as much as possible or just not look at her facial expressions. Oh lord, she is bad. So do your best to ignore her and enjoy the rest of the movie which I thought was really good. (If you also consider the show really good. Which Chris does not, so he probably would hate the movie) Oh, and I would say that the clothes aren't as appealing as they are in the tv show but they still hold up to the image of the tv show. Just being picky.

If you were ever a fan of the show I think you would enjoy the movie. The characters were as they should be and life happened to them all. They laughed, they cried, they fought and loved with wit and affection.

Now I may need to go back and watch some of those episodes again. But then again maybe not. The movie told a good ending and maybe I will just leave it at that.

P.S. Bring tissues

Oh and . . .

Superfudge!!! by Judy Blume that is another good one. I think that is the one where the boy and the girl are at the movies and their hands touch in the greasy popcorn, oh yeah, I read that page a hundred times.

And the Ramona books by Beverly Cleary. Though I didn't like Ramona as much, she was a little too bratty for me. But I remember "Boing!" and that she fixed the hem of her skirt (or her sister's) with tape and staples.

Of course The Babysitter's Club. I read at least 30 or 40 of those. They were a fun easy read.

Encyclopedia Brown!!! He was a kid detective. He used his smarts to figure things out. He once knew that this girl was lying about being in the shower (and not somewhere else where she had done something bad) because she was filing her nails, and she couldn't be filing her nails after a shower because they would be too soft. Why do I remember these things?

Hmmmm I am sure I will remember more the more I think about it. I will have to write these down. I know I have boxes of my books at my mom's house too. Ahhh fun fun . . .

Roller Derby

I don't remember the first time I heard about roller derby but I think I was in LA and I heard about a group doing it in a warehouse somewhere. It looks like the idea has caught on and there are teams all over the place. And serious league competitions.

Saturday we went to see the Rat City Roller Girls, the local league which is made up of four teams, plus a traveling all-star team which is apparently ranked 2 in the nation.

This past Saturday they had the Big Gay Bout in honor of Pride Fest coming up this week so the four teams were mixed up into two "fantasy teams", The Ligers (purple) and the something -Corns (not unicorns but something like that), (rainbow). And the All-Star team (black and white)played against the Bay Area Derby Girls (BAD), (black and gold). The Rat City girls won but the BAD girls put up a good fight, and all the girls played a little dirty. All-ll right.

It was a lot of fun. We sat on the floor by the track at one end of the oval giving us a good view of the action. We weren't in a big crash zone but we got to see a lot of them. Those girls take a beating. I personally don't like being pushed, falling down or being competitive especially with other girls so this is not a sport for me. I will happily cheer from the sidelines thank you very much.

The rules are pretty simple for the most part, I don't know all the things that get you sent to the penalty box but the basic rules of the game are simple. There is a girl with a star on her helmet, who starts in the back, and a girl with a stripe on her helmet, who starts in the front and several girls in the middle. The girls with the stars need to pass all the girls in the middle and the girl from the opposite team with the stripe. That is how you score points. The first girl to do this (there is one from each team) is the LEAD JAMMER! And she then gets to decide when to end the "Jam", if she feels like she is going to lose the lead to the other girl then she taps her hands on her hips and they start a new jam. And there is lots of shoving and falling during all of this too. It is a lot of fun to watch. The All-Star teams were especially aggressive and moved really fast. There were a lot of girls in the penalty box for that game.

We have already bought tickets for the game next month. Not all of our friends here are into it but Chris and I had a really good time. Girls in tights and roller skates beating each other up, what's not to like?!

Childhood favorites

Sunday we went to Third Place Books, one of my favorite places in Seattle. They have great food and sell new and used books. It just so happens that they were having 40% off all their used books. Awesome.

So I set out perusing the novels and sci fi but nothing jumps out at me, plus I am learning the joys of ordering library books online so I am less eager to buy the $8 paperback it will take me a day or two to read. Not finding anything I go to the children's section and I find a classics shelf. They had all kinds of things, Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland but the ones that caught my attention were the Little House on the Prairie books and Madeline L'Engle books. The used price for these was somewhere between $3 and $2 plus the 40% off, yay! I am in childhood memory heaven. I bought the first two Little House books, two Madeline L'Engle books including Meet the Austins (the Wrinkle and Time ones were a littl too much sci fi and not enough fantasy), and Harriet the Spy.

Since Sunday I have now re-read Meet the Austins and Harriet the Spy. I remembered them so well considering it has been probably fifteen years or more since I read them last.

I am on a trend of buying books and movies I use to love as a kid for my someday kids. I hope they like some of the things I have picked out for them. I want to get the books my mom use to read aloud to us too. I remember the Shakespeare comedies, the Edgar Rice Burrows, Tarzan series (we got up pretty far, there are a lot of those books), and the Catch Me If You Can book (we were older then but still loved to read together). Of course my mom tactfully skipped over the steamy scenes. And of course the Little House books which I have now started collecting. And I also got one of the Harry Potter books I was missing in hard cover, so I almost have the whole set of that modern classic now too.

Books are so much a part of my memories as a kid. Either listening to my mom read or sitting in my room with my pile of library books. I have such vivid pictures of how I imagined things in the stories; Harriet in the dumb waiter spying on her neighbors, Tarzan learning to read the words that looked like little ants to him. I must have read the whole YA (young adult) section at my local library in Jr. High. The Outsiders! That is one I read over and over again. I often wish I would have kept a list of all the books I read back then. I guess I should start now, better late than never.

Cool boy prints. Zoom!

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Bikes!

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States fabric

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Prints I like

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