in a bit of a netfix

Even pre-kids, husband and I never qualified as huge movie buffs, the type of people who pore over reviews or enthusiastically head to a theater to catch some hot new release most weekends.

As an interesting — or not — aside, I have an astonishing lack of retention when it comes to most movies. I don’t know why, but it’s been this way my entire life. I wonder sometimes if it has anything to do with the fact that I often feel I enter into sort of a beta-zone when watching, almost a dream state. Or if it’s just a strange and annoying thing about myself, that I can effortlessly breathe in, file away, and retain phone numbers and email addresses and generally useless bits of minutiae, but the plot, characters, actors, and even viewing of a movie are quickly wiped from the screen of my memory.

Husband in no way suffers from this affliction, but — diverting back to my intended topic here — overall we generally agree that our choice for two or more hours of our meager free time together isn’t likely to involve watching a screen, either at a theater or at home.

However, very very occasionally that’s exactly what we want to do on a Saturday night when any and everything else seems like far too much effort. So when it came to my attention earlier this year that Netflix was offering two movie swaps a month for like 5 bucks, I did a quick calculation of late fees we’d coughed up over the past year and signed up on the spot. We even watched four or five movies over the course of the summer, though asking me to name them would of course be fruitless.

Before school started back in session, Hotel Rwanda came up in our queue, and duly arrived. After about a month, we still hadn’t watched it and I asked husband if he thought we ever would, given that on several occasions he’d nixed it as too depressing for that evening’s entertainment, and after some discussion we agreed to send it on back and get something a little more, well, entertaining.

Over time we’ve discovered that there’s an overall disconnect on our attitude toward movies, which is that he wants to be solidly entertained and feel generally uplifted when the credits roll, and I rather enjoy sitting on the edge of my seat and feeling twisted and fucked up and generally unable to sleep by the end.

Be that as it may, Hotel Rwanda was set on the corner of the dining room table to go in the next day’s outgoing mail, and “Thank You For Smoking” was queued up.

Mid-morning that next day I came across this, on the floor:

Something's amiss

Which led me to ask 2-year-old Kira, the only possible culprit, “Honey, where’s the disk that was inside here?”

She walked into the kitchen and pointed to the floppy Tyvek sleeve on the floor…

something's a-missin'

… which was, naturally, empty.

“No, sweetie, the shiny round thing. The disk.”

She pointed here:

oh shit

Which, in context, is the housing for the baseboard heat, located just under the pass-through in my kitchen where this computer lives. My feet are inches from it at this moment. At points along its course, where maybe it’s warped, or the wall isn’t exactly square, there’s actually a very, very small gap between the actual housing unit and the wall.

Hands-and-knees investigation, with temple pressed to wall and a bit of squinting, revealed that she did indeed report the precise coordinates for its insertion. I do have to say I’m profoundly grateful for the marvels of young memory, since let’s face it, this is one DVD that — short of realizing my dream of a kitchen renovation which in its rosiest vision includes removal of this entire wall — would have been MIA for the duration.

I’m happy to report that a remarkable feat of engineering involving a brilliant concept, three inches of masking tape and a butter knife meant I didn’t have to spend the better part of my evening completely removing the entire housing unit.

In light of this adventure, however, I’m thinking maybe I should find a slightly more dramatic selection to put at the top of our queue before we send this one on in. Suggestions, anyone?