Month: February 2007

The Queen said “The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday–but never jam today.”
“It must come sometimes to ‘jam today.'” Alice objected.
“No, it can’t,” said the Queen. “It’s jam every other day: today isn’t any other day, you know.”
–Alice through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll.

Each Sunday I stare at my calender to mentally prepare for the week ahead. I note when events are happening and how the occurrence of various events require me to shift my schedule to accommodate them. Last Sunday I looked at the eventful week ahead and noted that the next week on the calendar was pretty empty. I thought “If I can just survive this week, then next week will be relaxing.” The only trouble is that the relaxing empty calendar week is a mirage. I had this exact same thought last Sunday and the Sunday before that and the Sunday before that. As I approach those empty spaces on the calendar, they inevitably begin to fill up with events and Things To Be Done.

The continual filling of my schedule is frustrating because I was supposed to spend this month being support personnel for Howard so he could work on the book. I was going to keep the house clean so that mess would not intrude on his brainspace. Instead I find my days full of things which I did not schedule, but which I am required to attend. I could skip out on some of them, but only at the expense of disappointing children. Today Gleek’s class has a Kindergarten Nursery Rhyme Party. I get to go and sit to listen to 26 kindergarteners lisp their way through nursery rhymes. As a reward I’ll be handed sugary treats that I neither want nor need. Next Friday Kiki’s class is going cross country skiing and she desperately wants me to go as a chaperon. I’ve never been on a field trip with Kiki, ever. Next year she’ll be in Junior High with many fewer field trips. I’m running out of chances. Besides cross country skiing is outdoor exercise. I should go. Then there are cub scout events, and art club, and business meetings and family coming into town…

Don’t get me wrong, all of these things are worth doing. I am deciding to do them rather than skip them because they are worth doing. I just wish that there wasn’t this unending pile of events which I didn’t schedule.

Can’t I ever get to the empty week this week? I want jam right now.

I just cancelled our membership to Blockbuster Online. We signed up several months ago because it seemed like a good deal and it allowed us to watch videos that simply aren’t in stock at the local stores. I greatly enjoyed watching the original Star Trek series with Kiki. At first everything was fine. But then Blockbuster began consistently sending us discs that were #5-8 in our queue even when #1-5 were all available. I understand that they practice something that is called “throttling” on high volume renters, but I did not think that 1-2 discs per week should qualify us as high volume. The other thing that really bugged me was their handling of discs that had waits on them. We were members for 5 months and we never reached the top of the “Short Wait” queue. How long is short?

All of this would not have bugged me so much, except that we were members at netflix back in 2004. I had none of these problems with netflix. The reason that we chose to go with Blockbuster this time was the in-store rentals that were included with the membership. Netflix can’t offer that. Unfortunately even that incentive has been removed since they’ll be closing our neighborhood Blockbuster store by the end of this month. There were apparently problems with the lease.

This means that Blockbuster will be completely losing our business. Unfortunately they’re so huge I doubt they’ll notice.

When I filled out the cancellation form, there was a large white box for comments. They even had text claiming how important my comments were to them. I obliged by explaining exactly why we were leaving. Then I hit submit and the system barked at me because my comment was too long. Yeah. They really care to hear what I have to say. We’ve been Blockbuster customers for 10 years, but no more.