Favorite Thing Friday

Aaron and I are late for many things. We have trouble getting to appointments on time but he's good about work. We never leave the house early when going to a social engagement -- we don't have that many social engagements with 4 little kids anyway. We live approximately 20 steps from our library and I had books that were 3 weeks overdue. Sometimes we owe late fees for bills even though I pay everything on the computer. My sister let me borrow a scrapbook book and I was supposed to return it the next week when I saw her, that was in July -- I still have the book (sorry, Monica). We end up paying beau coup bucks for rented movies too, enough that sometimes we should just buy the movie rather than rent them.

Movie rental is especially hard for us because we live in a little town in the middle of nowhere and for us to rent the movies we have to drive about 20 minutes to get the movies and by the time we get there they are all picked over, we can't decide what to get, and then we usually have a late fee from the time before. We have to watch them and get them back when they are due. So much time and gas for movies that probably stink and I will more than likely sleep through. Then my sister, Keely, talked about how she liked NetFlix. I got a free one month membership in the mail and tried it out. This is the best thing ever!

Basically it works like this: You choose your plan (we chose to get one movie at a time for $9 a month -- there are other plans like from 1 to 8 movies at a time for varying monthly fees). Then you choose your movies and put them in your queue (this is like your want list or cart) you put the movies in the order in which you want to receive them and you can change that at anytime. They send you a movie and you can keep it as long as you want -- there are no late fees at all! We just had a movie for 3 weeks before we returned it. You return the movie in the envelope it came in and there's no postage/shipping to pay ever, you just drop it in the mail. NetFlix emails you when they get the movie and then emails you to tell you a new one has been sent out. Lately they have been super quick. I mailed a DVD on Monday and we had a new one by Wednesday.

Another great feature of this company is they want you to rate the movie with stars and then based on how you rate movies, suggestions are given as to other movies you may enjoy based on your ratings. Movie ratings are shown so you can see what other people thought was great or not so great. There is also the option of viewing many movies online so there's no wait. I've never done that as I don't want to sit in my hard computer chair for 2 hours and watch a movie but it's a nice option to get extra movies especially for kids. There hasn't been one thing that we have disliked about it so far. We pay with our check card once a month -- it's automatically taken out and you can cancel a membership at anytime. A while back they emailed me and said they were sorry it took so long to send out a movie and gave me a $2 credit for the month. I hadn't even noticed that it took a day or two longer but it was super great customer service.

If you are interested in joining NetFlix, I have been given five one free month memberships. You can join for one month and see if you like it and it will cost you nothing if you decide to stop or you may discover it to be a favorite thing like we did and keep going. If you are interested in a trial membership, email me and I'll get the information to you. Check out Netflix here.