fall!

I've always been a fan of those few days that hint at the next season. This is, in my opinion, Virginia's single greatest selling point. The week in February when it's suddenly sunny and 65, for instance.

So, while I'm not actually fond of the whole cold weather thing, the 60s and 70s temperatures this weekend and today are a thing of joy. Today I am wearing a red tweedish blazer with a purple shirt, black skirt and no socks. And I took some clunky heels out of their box for the day. I like clothes entirely too much.

I think the informal tweedy blazer is my new best friend for fall. What's yours?

I have a load of LJ friends' updates to read this evening... think I had to go back 200 to catch the last one I'd already read (yikes), which might be an indication of a need to pare ye olde friends list.

the future of movie renting?

We have one of those movie-pass things from the video store that allows you to check out and return infinite numbers of DVDs (in groups of 2 at a time) in any given month. Those of you who have NetFlix will recognize it as essentially the same idea, but without the time lag of ordering stuff.

The reason we got it in the first place was that we tend to turn in things late, so we always owed late charges. So, smart move there.

What we didn't count on was the potential to fundamentally alter our movie-watching approach. See, if you can check out and return anything, and the video store is nearby, you could pick out something that seemed only like it might be good, try it for 10 minutes, and go back to the store for something else if your first choice sucked. The movie-pass thing totally frees you to experiment - because you're actually getting more value out of it if you try loads and loads of movies than if you only watched 5 good ones a month; there's little time and no financial penalty for a bad choice.

I find this fascinating. I find consumption patterns and pop culture pretty interesting to begin with, given the speed with which such things have changed in my lifetime.