The bad news: on Friday morning, as I was sipping my morning coffee and reading my guild forums, my hard drive died. I noticed that everything was quickly becoming less and less responsive, so I tried to reboot, and the poor little drive just didn’t manage to spin up again. For those of you playing along at home, this is indeed the second hard drive failure I’ve had recently - this time it was my internal drive rather than the external one I use for backups.

Luckily, I did have a backup, and it wasn’t a total shock, as the drive had been making upsetting noises for the past week or so. So after a trip to CompUSA and a little tinkering, we started restoring everything and had the machine in more or less working condition in time for Molten Core on Friday night. There are still a few things I need to deal with - applications that need to be reinstalled, some configuration I haven’t gotten around to, etc - but it’s largely thanks to my own Chris that things are back in action so quickly. He is pretty much the best boyfriend a geeky girl could ever have.

The good news is that I saw Bauhaus last night, and it was an incredible show. What’s especially cool is that this Bauhaus tour is taking advantage of the evil incarnate that is Clearchannel to produce instant live CDs at some venues, including the one I was at. So this morning I got to listen to a very high quality recording of last night’s show over my hangover breakfast special (strong coffee and rye toast). I went to the show with Al, though I also ran into a bunch of old friends who (like me) can pretty much only be dragged out for concerts these days. We considered heading to Batcave afterwards but ended up settling on a bar nearby for a couple post-show cocktails before heading home. All in all it was a pretty great night, and I’d strongly recommend that you get Bauhaus tickets if they’re coming anywhere near you this tour.

The Starbucks in my building is decorated for Christmas already, and I find this upsetting. I don’t need to hear Christmas songs every time I go get coffee for the next month and a half, although I guess I don’t really have a problem with the red cups. Maybe I should dye my hair to match?

In other news, The Cure’s cover of “Young Americans” is gold. Go get it right now.

I am still full of TiVo love, although Chris is having a hard time adjusting - he likes to flip through live TV, while I prefer to come home and watch what I told the TiVo to record already. If something good is on while I’m watching a recording, I have confidence that Captain TiVo will record it for me and then I can watch that too.

Another new addition to our household is my shiny new Nikon S1. I went with tiny and light rather than large and powerful because I know from experience that I will never take a heavy camera with me anywhere. And what’s the point of having a camera that you never use? This baby is hardly larger than a credit card, but the pictures are very good, and it was pretty cheap. Can’t complain. I just need to pick up a bigger memory card for it and then hopefully you’ll see a lot more photos from me.

Now we just need a Roomba and a couple of new computers. I’ll go check the change jar.

We finally got around to setting up the TiVo over the weekend, and as you can imagine we’ve been having a lot of fun with it. The physical setup was a minor pain in the ass, but only because it involved digging around behind our tv stand and bookcases trying to plug everything into everything else. But since we got that sorted out, it’s been essentially Geek Christmas. I plan to play with it even more tonight.

Met up with my usual Thursday crew for drinks last night, which was fun as always. I wish I could still stay out as late as I did when I was in college, but Thursday isn’t the end of the week for me anymore - I get up while it’s still dark out on Friday and I definitely regret it if I don’t get a reasonable amount of sleep. I think four day work weeks should become standard practice - those crazy academics have the right idea.

Maybe it’s because drinking makes me more talkative than usual, but I seem to invariably get chatty cab drivers on my way home from bars. Not that I’m complaining; it’s nicer to have a conversation with someone than to sit in silence or listen to whatever god-awful radio station they might be playing. Last night, my cabbie was a man who lived not far from me, just over the bridge into Queens, so we talked a lot about some of the various neighborhoods we’d lived in. He agreed wholeheartedly that Roosevelt Island is a world away from Washington Heights and that while it might be fairly expensive (at least compared to the outer boroughs), it’s definitely worth it. And it also turned out that he minored in philosophy when he was in college - who knew? Maybe I’d make a good cab driver, too, although I doubt it. (I hate driving.)

It’s looking like it’s time to throw out our pumpkins already, as they’re getting fairly saggy-faced and I don’t want to end up cleaning pumpkin goop off of any surfaces. It’s always sad to see the last traces of Halloween disappear, especially since they’re being replaced by the first signs of the impending Christmas season. I have nothing against Christmas, but the transition from ghosts straight into santas just serves to remind me how very short my favorite season actually is. I will attempt to defy the encroaching red and green by eating a great deal of pumpkin pie between now and December. I feel that this is a foolproof plan.

I’ve spilled coffee on myself three separate times today. By the time you read this, it may be four. Or five. I guess this is one of the reasons that it pays to wear a lot of black.

I looked for my digital camera last night so I could take pictures of the pumpkins, and I could not find it, although I’m sure it’s around somewhere. But surely my temporary inability to locate it is reason enough to buy a new camera entirely. Right? Right? Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Last night we did carve pumpkins, but not so much with the handing out candy. I don’t know whether it’s that we live in New York or that I got home from work rather late, but by the time I got up to my apartment and was ready to ogle cute kids in costumes, the only people going up and down the hallway were uncostumed teenagers with shopping bags from Gristedes. I feel that if you’re fifteen or sixteen and can’t even be bothered to dress up, you can go across the street to the grocery store and buy your own damn candy. None of that shit would fly in my hometown - you dress up or you get squat.

So the result is that we have an abundance of leftover candy and ended up spending most of the evening up to our elbows in pumpkin guts and Baby Ruth wrappers while watching Poltergeist. If I can locate my digital camera, I’ll take some pictures of the pumpkins, which came out excellently. We also have a ton of that Jones Halloween soda, which isn’t as bad as that review might leave you to believe. That’s not to say I’m going to stock up on candy corn soda and drink nothing else for the rest of my life. But it could be a lot worse for something that comes in adorable pumpkin cans.

All the Halloween stuff in Warcraft has been pretty fun, too. My bank is full of wands, which I’m stocking up on and will save for unsuspecting groups six months from now. And I got a Pumpkin Bag in the Plaguelands, which rules. I will be sorry to see all the ghost and jack-o’-lantern decorations go away, but I guess they’ll be back next year.