Another month here at Sheep Guarding Llama. I went to Empire State today to sign up for my classes starting on the 20th. Dominica was able to go watch some TV on the couch today for about one hour. She is really hoping that she will be able to fly to Houston in two days. It is a good thing that we got a flight that leaves late in the day – it gives her almost another day to get better.
Anne Update number sixteen went up today. I even got the chance to IM with her a little bit today. It is hard to catch her with the time difference and the blocking of her IM and all.
I finished reading Harry Potter: The Prisoner of Azkaban late last night. I stayed up just to finish it. That was definitely the best book so far. I couldn’t put it down. I can’t wait to read the last book. It isn’t out in paperback for a while so I might get it on CD for now and listen to all 13 hours of it while I am in the car. I can’t believe how addicted to these books I have become. I am currently working on some David Eddings stuff – the Belgariad. That is pretty good too.
As I project, I think that I am going to start builing a full blown, in house, Llama movie collection digital library. That way, we can look up what movies we have off of a central database server. What a cool idea. I need something like that to work on to keep me focused. Right now, all of the movies are on a spreadsheet that we update by hand everytime there is a new movie added or someone watches one (yes, we keep track of how many times each movie has been watched!) Currently, there are 474 movies on Laserdisc and DVD. Those movies have been watched approximately 1080 times. We also track the cost of purchasing the movies. This allows us to determine whether or not the collection is cost effective. If it becomes cheaper to rent movies, then we have to reconsider how the movies are purchased. Currently, we are maintaining the collection right at the cost of renting. We are hovering between $5.60 and $5.90 for every time that we watch a movie. This movie goes up and down drastically around when we have a big buying spree or someone is sick and stays home and watched a lot of movies.
The current movies reigning as the most watched are Bulletproof and Raiders of the Sun at ten times each and both on Laserdisc. This, however, does not reflect the total number of times that Thumb Wars has been watched since there are seven copies of it in the house. The next most watched movies at nine times each are Aladdin and Happy Gilmore on Laserdisc and My Blue Heaven on DVD. Chasing Amy has been watched eight times and is also on Laserdisc. Muppet Treasure Island, Liar, Liar and Jurassic Park are all on Laserdisc and have been viewed seven times along with The Truman Show on DVD. That rounds out our most popular movies. As you can see, even though a lot of our most popular movies (recently) are now on DVD, the biggest ones are still the old standby Laserdiscs which really says a lot for the movies because they are a lot more of an effort to watch, especially since everyone has a DVD player in their room and we have a lot of people who borrow the DVDs while there are only two LD players in the house and Josh is the only person who could borrow any and he never does since he used to live with us and has seen them all already.
Since we also track how much the movies cost, I can tell you that Dragon Fire, Shooting Elizabet, Raiders of the Sun and Muppet Treasure Island were our best buys of all time – each coming in at costing less than $1.00 per time watched. That is something considering three of those movies where unhead ofs when they were purchased. You will notice, however, that most of those make the WHAT! movie list. That list does a lot to help promote a movie around the house.
I finally managed to track down Mary this evening. She is now back living in Geneseo and about to start her new job at Pioneer Credit in Perry (yeah, none of us can completely escape – can we?) This makes two friends of mine who work for Pioneer Credit! How weird. Mary and Jocelyn have broken up – so Mary is officially single now. So all of you who have been waiting the last couple years for your chance, here it is. Mary has also shaved her head – I think that I will call her, Mini Me.