Every so often I need to be reminded of my gothling days and my purple hair, which sadly, I have no pictures of because I had no camera, and none of my friends did either.  Sigh......  I guess I will always be a goth at heart.  Once a goth, always a goth.  And goth from the days when goth was glamour, and not "Oh I wanna die.", and "O life, the giant sucking leech that robs me of my will to live." kind of goth.  When we were goth we wore beautiful clothes (and not necessarily all black), lots of velvets, brocades, damasks, listened to pop, read Anne Rice novels (which is most likely where most of our fashion influence came from), romantic poetry, wore lots of black eyeliner, wore bright red lipstick, beautiful jewelry and crosses and cut gemstones, cut our hair like Bettie Page and were social.....  and I suppose alot of goths still wear their hair like Bettie Page, and wear velvet and whatnot, but its changed.  Hey!  I still do those things and get paid for them for seven weekends out of the year.  So I guess doing the Ren Fest thing is like my "socially acceptable" adult way of doing the goth thing.  And my decorating tastes have not really changed since then, I can just better afford nicer things now like nice candle holders, prettier fabrics, nicer furniture and antiques and artwork.

So I am thinking that this reminiscence is stemming from the fact that today is my birthday and I am 35, and, well, I'm not that thrilled about it, but not devastated either.  I don't look 35 since I live in Houston and humidity, while a formidable hair foe in the 70's, is a blessing in disguise for one's skin.  So make it up to myself today, some friends and I are going to see The Producers this afternoon and then on to SUSHI!

And file this one under the "Holy Shit!" category.....  I got my phone bill a few weeks ago and not knowing how much it actually cost to call Tarik in Kuwait and Jordan I just called away.  So I am now $1500 poorer.  $125 for a 30 minute call!  DAMN!  I now have calling cards that are $20 for 100 minutes.  When I told him about it he was mad at first, I think from the shock, then laughed about it because it was so ridiculous.

And we had a death in the family last week, a computer death.  We have a network at home with a server and 4 workstations including my PC, Tarik's PC, a PC in one of the bedrooms where he works on other PC's and a laptop on our wireless network.  So about a week and a half ago I am TRYING to save some stuff I was working on but couldn't access my directory on the server, where EVERYTHING is kept (we keep nothing on our individual hard drives).  Well, I reboot the server, no luck, unplug and replug EVERYTHING, reboot the server, still no luck.  So, last Saturday morning I call Tarik to have him talk me through a diagnostic.  He says he can access the server remotely just fine, but I have no connection and he doesn't understand why.  So I pull the server out of its cubby hole and unhook it from his monitor (he has some keystrokes that will switch between his PC and the server) and hook it up to another one, hook up a new keyboard and we're off.  In a nut shell without getting too techie, the main drive on our server is toast.  Gone, zapped, all of our data kaput.   I now have no access to any of my music (1,500 MP3's), pictures, documents, any of the printers, cannot sit in bed and use the laptop to chat or web surf, and ANYTHING!  How heinous is that! Still, its not a total disaster because Tarik backed everything up before he left in October so anything we had on there we can recover.  But anything since then is gone.  Oh well.  Technology, you can't live with it, you can't kill it.

Song virus do jour ~ "Common People" by Pulp