I uploaded the new, revised and expanded Halloween area to my main website this evening. All new vintage Halloween postcard images, new design, new Trick or Treat bags, updated links and more. I'm working on more images to add before Halloween also.
Check it out!
Well, we've spent the last week getting ready for a category 3 hurricane (that was supposed to rival the Great Storm of 1900 that pretty much flattened the city of Galveston) that has now trickled down to a tropical storm and has also made a beeline for New Orleans instead of the Texas Gulf Coast. We have water, batteries, canned foods and there's never a shortage of candles in a Goth household. While I'm glad we're all prepared (there's another one right behind it), and all we seem to be getting from it are some strong winds and the possibility of rain, I hope it doesn't pick on New Orleans too much. Besides being my favorite city, my best friend and her husband have bought a beautiful old house there that they're been restoring for over a year. Despite it's lack of elevation, she says New Orleans is actually more hurricane-worthy than Houston, many of the buildings having withstood over a hundred years worth of similar and worse storms. They also have the whole drainage thing planned out better than we do.
The whole hurricane thing actually has us a bit freaked out this year. Since last year we've had our roof replaced (because of storm damage) and most of our windows replaced (to try and save a little on our summer electric bill, it actually worked!). We've also spent over $2000 repairing my car so I'd really rather not have it float away or have any flying objects hurled through the windows (already did that once, auto glass is expensive!).
However, the anticipation of disaster has motivated my husband to help me clean out the garage with the hopes of actually being able to store my car in it after four years of only his car residing in our 2-car garage (before photo below). I've convinced him that the majority of his junk really would be happier living in our attic instead, and would actually be more accessible there than it is piled to the ceiling in the garage. We've got about 2/3rds of it cleared out, so almost there. Of course, my Olds has sat outside for most of it's 11 years anyway, but it would make me happy. And "someday" there will be another car to replace it ;-)
Thursday afternoon and evening it was storming here in Houston, the power flickered but never went out. My email was still down (seems to be back up now), so I decided to redesign my husband's website though I had lots of other things to do, filling the creative void I guess. I reworked the entire website, finishing up at almost 7am. I learned to make those pretty little navigation tabs with the guidance of Scott Kelby's Photoshop 7 Down & Dirty Tricks (page 149, I had to look through four books to find the trick) and spent hours adding type, color, etc. Looks good, IMHO. Now I just need to finish redesigning my own main website, especially my Halloween area, which is 98% finished in GoLive, sitting on my hard drive waiting to be uploaded.
Suitable mood music for the weather and introspection included:
Deep by Peter Murphy
Haunted by Poe, one of my favorite albums
Tales of Mystery and Imagination by The Alan Parsons Project, a classic rock album based on the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, a desert island staple
Formica Blues by Mono, haunting retro music that would make a great 60's spy movie soundtrack
Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd, another must have
Banned Books Week begins this morning, it runs September 21st-28th. I saw a nice display for it at our local Half Price Books the other day and even a small display at Barnes & Noble this evening. Since my first job was as a library assistant, this subject is close to my heart. I still can't believe we have a need to even argue the whole point of free speech, but then I don't understand why middle-aged white men stand in picket lines in front of abortion clinics... Actually I do, it's because they're afraid the white race is dying out because of women like me who don't want to accidentally get pregnant and just "have to have it", we actually want to plan life altering events like pregnancy. I've been one of those people who has always known I'm not mother material, I'm finally at the age now where people have pretty much stopped bothering me. The anti-choice people will argue that they want to save lives, but there a million other truly humane things they could do other than harrass (and kill) doctors and patients, like maybe adopt some of the thousands of children who are already in the world and need homes. My brother and I were both adopted, it worked nicely for us.
OK, off the soapbox (for now ;-). I picked up a copy of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 a few months ago after seeing part of the film on TV. Somehow I was never required to read it in school, and had never seen the movie, but it seems appropriate reading material for this week. Let's see, what other thought provoking selections can I pull from my bookshelves... I have a preference for female writers, so here are some of my favorites:
Shirley Jackson is my all-time favorite author, good ones for this week would be The Road Through the Wall, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, The Bird's Nest, and of course, The Haunting of Hill House. Also worth reading is her hilarious novel about raising her own children, Life Among the Savages.
Alice Hoffman is incredible, try Practical Magic (in an entirely different league than the movie "based" on the book), or the disturbing Here On Earth.
Another female writer with a very unique style is Valerie Martin. Mary Reilly, Alexandra, The Great Divorce (look for used or check the link, it's apparently being reprinted in February 2003), and Set In Motion are all excellent (the last two are set in New Orleans, which always adds points to a book for me, it's my favorite city ;-)
Ann Arensberg's Sister Wolf has happily been reprinted because of the release of Incubus (which I own but haven't read yet). Sister Wolf is a terrific book, really hard to describe.
Carol O'Connell has one of the smartest, toughest female detective in literature in her character Kathy Mallory. I've read about half of the series, I discovered it four novels into it and was hooked. Chronologically it's: Mallory's Oracle, The Man Who Cast Two Shadows, Killing Critics, Stone Angel (my favorite), Shell Game and Crime School. She also has another novel that's not part of the series (in my "to read" stack) that's gotten great reviews, Judas Child.
There are many more novels I'm not mentioning (don't flame me for leaving your favorite out!), but I'm just going by what I've read in recent years and what has personally touched me. Most of my reading is actually vampire & horror novels, and lots of non-fiction, but that's for another day.
A million thanks to Kristine of kadyellebee� for her help in fixing my rebuild problem! Check out her blog, it's amazing! It's wonderful not to see that stupid error message anymore, my head was getting sore from slamming it against my desk too...
For her fix and the support transcript, see the posting here�.
I've been having problems with my email, browser, weblog and even my car the last few days which all started on Friday the 13th coincidentally. I'm still not able to post entries as of 9/17, but here are all the playlists for the last few days.
Friday 9/13 - Entering PMS zone and in need of comfort music. Listened to Suzanne Vega all night. Solitude Standing, Nine Objects of Desire, 99.9 F† and Songs in Red and Gray.
Saturday and Sunday - Brain has reached sensory overload (decided to just skip my period and keep taking my BC pills non-stop). Played Jeffrey Thompson's Alpha Relaxation System� Active Relaxation CD nonstop. Nice soothing surf sounds and piano music....
Monday night - I actually needed to get some work done (EBay listings) so I needed something upbeat that I didn't need to pay attention to. Since I discovered the prolific German duo Rosenstolz last year, I've been acquiring everything of theirs I can get. They did a CD single with the mother of Punk, Nina Hagen and that's what caught my eye originally, being a Nina fan from way back. I just checked out their homepage�, they have a new album Macht Liebe�, yippee, looks to be only available as a single in the US but Amazon.de has the tntire album and a limited edition 2 disc album! I listened to a terrific compilation 3 CD set, Stolz der Rose - Das Beste und Mehr�, and two CD singles - Kinder der Nacht (seems to be out of print even at Amazon.de)�, and the previously mentioned CD featuring Nina Hagen and Marc Almond (formerly of Soft Cell) Total Eclipse 2�.
Tuesday night - nothing but silence in the house as I fought with my screwed up weblog (see Fumbling in the Dark).
I've spent the last few days in (partially, I think) self-imposed internet version of hell. (This entry will probably not even post today, but I'm writing in anyway)
It all started Friday the 13th (hmmm...). First I decided to upgrade my browser from Netscape 7 Beta to the new "improved" version 7. I've been using 4.79 (now 4.8) and had just been playing with the Beta version because it annoyed me, though not as much as versions 6x, which I refused to even use at all.
Well, I had already sort of decided to make the plunge and start using Explorer for Mac instead of Netscape just because overall it really seems to work better and is much more compatible with most of the newer websites out there. But I wanted to at least give Netscape 7 a try...
So, I ran the install on it, and it automatically imported the (incomplete) set of bookmarks from my Beta version. Being an idiot (and not realizing the 4x bookmark preference file would work with the version 7), I went through and deleted lots and lots of old internet pref files, and apaprently ended up deleting part of something that my email program (Entourage, Outlook for Office 2001) used, because the next day when I went to read my email, the program crashed and gave me an error box. I had backed it up on the 12th, but unfortunately all the messages that came in on the 13th were lost after I reinstalled, rebuilt, restarted, etc. amd finally got the program to work. Turned out the one of the Database files was apparently corrupt. Oh well, I was all set to brag on the 14th (my mother's birthday, BTW) that I was switching to IE after using Netscape from day one (must be a Mac thing), and how I had to stop using Netscape's mail program about a year ago because one of the Inbox files (Inbox.snm?) for it kept going bad and basically destroying my inbox (where I store thousands of emails), and then Entourage acts up.
Anyway, I thought OK, it's fixed, I just lost one day's worth of messages, I'm lucky and everything seemed peachy. Then Monday evening I sort of realized that I hadn't been getting nearly as many messages as I usually do, and so I went in and checked my backup mail system (Yahoo) and yes, only about a third of my messages had slipped through to me. I checked my mail server's (Roadrunner) status page, they had had mail problems about two weeks ago, and as usual, it said everything was fine. So I sent myself an email from Yahoo to Roadrunner, and it bounces back to me as "blocked". That's great... contacted the online help people, blew their little kitty minds with all of my copy & paste error messages, and they eventually referred me to Roadrunner "Security", confirming that yes, my email was being blocked. Haven't heard back from them yet (almost 24 hours, guys), so I'm having to read two email lists to make sure I'm not missing any orders or EBay payments, etc.
To add to my angst, I decided to work on my weblog earlier this evening. I thought, I want to add a note at the end of each post so it shows what category the message is from. So I played with that and eventually got the catefgory to show up, but then I decided "let me link the category URL also". Not good, I ended up somehow adding a bad tag that has my weblog now hung where it won't rebuild the index page (see support post here� if you're curious). It appears other people have had similar problems, but none of their fixes worked for me, so I hope one of the geniuses that knows what they're really doing with all of this XHTML will have an answer. I added several new categories also, and they aren't showing up either yet...
Hello all, ever have one of those days (weeks, month... years?) when you feel like someone's holding your head underwater and if you could just surface long enough to get a deep breath you might have a chance? I've had that overwhelming feeling for the past few days (actually the last year has been that way to a degree, sort of bobbing up and down like a buoy, never really finding solid ground).
The last few days I've had that "if anyone else says a word to me my head will explode" feeling. I don't know if it's my MS, the unstable state of the entire bloody world right now, or just the bombardment of one thing after another that have been landing on me, but I'm glad I have a place to write aimlessly this evening...
My poor car has been in for repairs a total of six times in six weeks (could be more, I've lost count). And then after all the repairs, it didn't pass the new ultra-strict Texas emissions test (too late now, boys, our environment's been ruined since I was a teenager!), and I had to take it back to the mechanic to spend another $350 on a catalytic convertor. Just got it out of the shop again today and drove around town buying birthday presents for my mom and my best friend, and the damn thing vibrated and rattled the entire time
Just too many bills due at one time, I haven't been caught up in so long I can't even remember... and Christmas is coming, aarrggghh!
I've been sitting and staring at my 100+ incoming emails, mostly EBay questions (I sell stuff there, username morticiasmorgue) asking things that I've already listed in my item descriptions (shipping, etc.) and just feel like I want to take an Ambien and crawl back into bed.
Halloween is hurtling towards us, which is my favorite holiday, but I have to plan out everything for our annual party, which doesn't sound hard, but when you only host one party a year, it is. And I'm a Capricorn, a born perfectionist, so everything has to be perfectly planned and none of it will ever be good enough for me. I don't do the Martha Stewart thing, but there's food to be planned, music to be recorded, lots of mandantory cleaning (I keep telling my husband that spiderwebs and dust are good Halloween decorations but he doesn't agree), witty email & anailmail invitations to layout & type, AND I have to think up a costume. I saw this fabulous sheer black velvet batwing top in the Juniors department at Foley's tonight (I think it was by XOXO), and in a futile gesture actually tried it on, but my anorexic Junior size days have long passed.
I think I'll cop out and do the Alice Cooper makeup I talked about yesterday. I think it will scare the shit out of people, it's a shame we're not having our party on the actual day of Halloween (next year it's on a Friday :-), I'd love to answer the door done up as Alice. We have so many little kids in the neighborhood, they'd probably run off screaming if I did. Just my big black witch hat evokes squeals from them. Halloween isn't like it was when I was a kid, but that's a whole different blog. I'd like to start a webring for all of the displaced people such as myself who grew up with real Halloween memories, maybe if I can find the time and energy...
Off to flip through my CD's for something to distract me. I heard a commercial earlier where they were using Suzanne Vega's Tom's Diner so now that's going though my head in a loop. Maybe I'll pull out of her CD's and play them tonight...
Current bedtime reading is Karen E. Taylor's The Vampire Vivienne, part of a very cool series of vampire books with mostly female vamp heroines. Most of her books have recently been reissued because of the release of Vivienne and a new book, Resurrection: The Vampire Legacy, so snatch them up before they're gone. Now I've got to get the newest one too, it just came out this month, I'm excited!
Warning, I have really diverse tastes in music. About the genres I won't listen to are country and rap. In an effort to drown out the soundtrack to Barbarella (playing in my husband's room), I'm listening to these tonight:
Super Furry Animals Rings Around the World. This is the third album of their's I've bought (one is all in Welsh, haven't been able to get into it yet), but they are one of the hardest to describe bands I've listened to and are really in a weird class by themself.
Saint Etienne So Tough, a very early album of theirs. A British retro eclectic type band who has inspired me to check out other bands that have been labeled as "similar" by music reviewers including the wacky Japanese band Pizzicato Five (more on them later ;-)
The French equivalent of SE is Autour De Lucie, I'm listening to Faux Movement tonight. Really excellent French retro type pop band.
Garbage's Beautiful Garbage is in the mix just for fun. All of their albums are incredible, great driving music I discovered on a recent seven hour drive to New Orleans.
And because I was discussing Alice Cooper with my best friend on the phone earlier tonight, Welcome To My Nightmare, which I can listen to just about any time. I've been debating doing Alice's makeup for our Halloween party this year, I could be his younger sister. I have long dark wavy hair, a long Roman nose and deep set eyes. It really scares the hell out of my husband, who claims he doesn't really want to be married to Alice ;-)
(scary pic of me in the dark, with no makeup at all... even scarier)
I think I can pull it off, don't you? At least I won't have to wear heels during the party. I was Elvira last year, the heels are a pain on hardwood floors.
I've spent the day sort of wandering past the TV that my husband leaves on 24/7 (all news, all the time) seeing the flags, memorial services and catching too many flashes of Bush's face out of the corner of my eye. I think the nation is oversaturated with 9/11 programming, though the irony is we can never truly pay tribute to those who died a year ago. I live in Texas, I've never ventured as far north as New York, though my husband has stayed at the WTC Marriott multiple times... I can't even begin to imagine the pain the families and friends of the victims must have experienced this past year.
My goal for today was to write this entry and to listen to two albums, Simon & Garfunkel's Greatest Hits and David Bowie's Heathen. Why? Read on and I'll tell you the how they both relate to my personal experience with September 11th...
David Bowie swears that his latest album was completed pre 9/11, but upon repeated listenings, it's hard to believe.
If you've ever thought that perhaps Bowie really is a bit of an "alien", or even somewhat psychic, Heathen will validate your imaginings. The album and even it's bonus CD seem to be a tribute to our post-apocalyptic world and to New York especially. While the eerie undertones might have gone unnoticed prior to last September, in this overly aware world we live in today the songs seem to be fraught with hidden meanings.
Personally, I've been seriously rediscovering Bowie the last few years, Earthling caught my attention and I've been working backwards since then. The morning of 9/11 my husband and I were actually awake and had the ever-present TV on, we had appointments for our annual physicals at 9 am (CST). I work nights and rarely rise before 2 or 3 in the afternoon, which made the day even longer and more surreal. While I lay in bed trying to wake up, my perky hubby was trying to catch some of the Today Show before we had to leave, so the first thing I heard that day was "Come here and look at this, a plane has hit the World Trade Center!". OK, that woke me up.
We sat and watched the frantic and confused newscasters, and then saw the second plane hit, and the realization hit that this wasn't an accident. Then before we walked out the door to leave, the first of the two buildings crumbled to dust. Listening to the radio in the car, we heard the news that the remaining tower had fallen also. The rest of the day was spent in sort of a haze... two more planes had crashed... our doctor had a daughter who had just returned from New York... a nurse heard on TV there was a plane missing from radar in the Houston area (we'd make a nice combustible target)... rumors flew everywhere while the country waited for the non-existent next shoe to fall.
When my brain is overwhelmed, songs get stuck through my head in an endless loop. The song that played in my head was Simon & Garfunkel's "America". Not sure why, it's a nice song but not really a favorite or anything. I had always thought that when something of this magnitude actually happened, I would hear R.E.M.'s "It's the End of the World as We Know It", always seemed the logical choice.
We sat and diligently watched the first 9/11 telethon, and when the second one aired we settled in to watch it also (yes, we sat through the entire thing). A single spotlight came up and there sat David Bowie cross-legged on a darkened stage with a little synthesizer. As soon as he began to sing, I realized it was "America", the song that had been running through my head non-stop since the attacks. I screamed outloud, scaring the hell out of my husband, who couldn't even recall the original song in his head. But I realized right there that David Bowie IS psychic or some sort of preternatural being.
I pre-ordered the special edition of "Heathen" (with the bonus CD) with high hopes and wasn't disappointed by even a single song. I haven't been able to stop playing it since I received it...
On the CD turntable for the evening of 9/11:
David Bowie ?Heathen Discs 1 & 2 (see 9/11 rant for explanation of this and S&G)
Simon and Garfunkel's ?Greatest Hits
Suzanne Vega Songs in Red and Gray
Kim Wilde's self titled 1981 CD (oop, ?closest match), perhaps because of "Kids in America", or perhaps just a flashback to my carefree youth...
I can't believe after a week of trying, I think I've actually gotten this thing to work (well, except in Netsape 4.x versions, still working on that)
This weblog is to serve as both a way to keep everyone updated on my sometimes overwhelmingly large site and also as an outlet for my hyperactive brain. As soon as I figure out what the hell I'm doing, I plan on making this page a little nicer looking also.
I am in the midst of reworking my entire site, including adding an "about me" area that so many people have asked for (yes, with some photos even), so consider this log to be beginning of this enterprise. Also, it will give me a chance to let everyone know what's going on on this massive site on a regular basis. For starters, look for an all new Halloween area, including lots of new pics of my vintage Halloween collection and a nifty new interface courtesy of my studies of Adobe GoLive 6, which I've been trying to learn this year.
The way I first encountered these weblogs and online diaries was when I realized half of the teenagers in Europe seemed to be linking directly to the images on my webpage and they were sending my traffic quota way over the monthly limit. (I thought I'd just gotten really popular, but alas, no) I've been writing all of the brilliant thoughts that keep me from sleep every night in a notepad beside my bed, saying I'll find the time to add them to my website but never seem to do it. So, I thought this might be a better idea, especially since I get these weird fits of prose at godawful hours of the night and really do need to get them out of my head before retiring.
Morticia, Mistress of the Morgue