mere cat

Netflix

I’m watching a cat-hair tumbleweed swirl around like the trash bag in American Beauty. We’ve been away for a week on vacation, and the mere cats have been working overtime shedding, the implication being that cat-hair tumbleweeds only appear when we’re on vacation, which would be a blatant misrepresentation of our housekeeping, not to mention a run-on sentence.

I mention American Beauty for no other reason than to segue into the news that we signed up with Netflix. Why is this news? For one thing, we spend almost no time in front of the TV, maybe 20 hours a year. An Inconvenient Truth was the first movie we’ve seen in years, yet we both like movies a lot. It’s just that we never carve out any couch time.

We’ve thought about Netflix as a solution for our movie-less ways, but despite its advantages (selection and convenience), it seemed to only promise a treadmill of movies we’d never get around to watching. By treadmill I mean one movie a week; if we didn’t watch that many, it stopped making economic sense at the $17.99/month rate I had heard about. Then we learned they have a “lite” option with a limit of two movies a month for only $5.99. We might be able to keep up with that. We already had a “queue” of sorts—a list of movies we both wanted to see, but of course had no way to watch. Our first two movies will be Ulee’s Gold (1997) and Amelie (2001).