Friday, March 22, 2013

Cabin Fever

What is it about this time of year anyway? I feel like I'm pulling teeth. Everyone is spent, and going all non co-op on me. Things that should take ten minutes, are taking an hour or more, and to make matters worse, my allergies have made me crabby. I find myself just about to snap at someone, only to be unceremoniously interrupted by a dozen or so sneezes. I'm no real winner here either, as my efficiency levels have been gradually waning since about two weeks into winter, so a fair amount of my crabbiness is directed at myself. But I'm finding that even the tiniest things can set me off lately, like this new "thing" about naming every single winter storm. Apparently, winter storm Virgil is now brewing. I mean, what is the criteria for naming these things anyway? Names only make them seem more ominous. Maybe that's what they're after...making everyone paranoid, fearing power outages as extreme as those we had during Sandy. Once a storm is forecasted, it's like everyone goes into survivalist mode. Stores are wiped clean of water, milk, bread, and duct tape. My mother is always the first to call, pleading with me to stock up on water and toilet paper (???) for the kids' sakes. I don't know how best to stock up anyway. I've got a twelve year old son, and his appetite has reached astronomical proportions. There is nary an item I can buy in bulk that isn't consumed or devoured in a day or two, rendering us all completely unprepared by storm day two or three.

So anyway, yes, we've had cabin fever for weeks now. I thought that we could remedy a bit of the frustration we were all feeling by starting up my husband's Netflix gift subscription. What would work better to distract us from this abysmal weather than streaming movies over the net? We were so proud of ourselves for having thought to give him a three month trial subscription for Christmas, but he held onto the codes for a lot longer than we had hoped. His reasoning was that he wanted to have a list handy of all of the films he wanted to watch. I figured I'd write my own list, too. Finally, the pressure was too great, so he succumbed to starting it up a couple of weeks ago. And let me tell you, I was completely and utterly uninformed about what Netflix was really like. I naively thought that I could watch just about everything on it. As I used the search function to check for the films on my list, I was met with one disappointment after another. Not one of the films I wanted to watch was even on there. Mind you, we just have the Instant Watch part of the package. So there was no watching A Man For All Seasons, Bella, Some Kind of Wonderful, Neverending Story, Grosse Pointe Blank, and a number of other titles I had been itching to watch. I felt like a big dope. It just really never occurred to me that 1) these wouldn't be on there, and 2) that the current shows and films on there would eventually expire and be replaced. That said, I did manage to watch some stuff I've enjoyed, namely season one of Downton Abbey. Of course, Netflix doesn't have season two, nor are they like to. Apparently, Amazon has an exclusive deal on Downton going forward. So of course, now I'm coveting Amazon Prime.

Off to rally the troops, and pull some more teeth. 

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