The Rock Star and I are unapologetic homebodies. Even BEFORE we had children, an evening of chilling out on the couch in pajama trousers ranked fairly high above going out to clubs, pubs, whatnot. So, in the Post Prawn, Pre Squid era, it should come as a surprise to nobody that on any given night, you’ll find us at home; me usually working on crafty nonsense and The Rock Star noodling away to his heart’s content on one of his various axes.

We occasionally get sucked into tv trends. During our time on the boat, the best part of a year was devoted to the whole of The West Wing series. This is, of course, not embarrassing in the slightest as it was an often taut, but at the same time funny and deeply clever political televisual masterpiece. However, not all of our tastes are quite so highbrow as is evidenced by our latest guilty viewing pleasure, the top rated HBO titty and vampire fest, True Blood.

Vampires have kind of come and gone in popularity during my adolescence and young adulthood from Gary Oldman’s peculiarly butt-shaped hairdo in “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” to Tom Cruise’s peculiarly butt-shaped performance in “Interview With a Vampire”. I must admit to a 4 book Anne Rice blitz back in my late teens and early 20’s. Rice’s sexually charged but strangely celibate vampires made for good stories, but even at my most romantically impressionable, I don’t think I would have ever been prone to a clothes-rending, emotionally charged squealfest at the mere mention of one of these Children of the Night a-la today’s fanatical “Twi-hards”. (Who also, coincidentally, favor sexually charged but strangely celibate vampires. At least until they get a ring on your finger, and then apparently, there’s a lot of headboard breakage that goes on.) I have to wonder what my reaction would have been to “Twilight” as a 16 year old girl. Anne Rice’s vamps were obviously very grown up, sensual, sophisticated and worldly, so reading about them as a teenager was rather like peaking through the bannister at a cocktail party going on downstairs after you’ve gone to bed. But EDWARD CULLEN HAS 2 TAKE HIGH SCHOOL BIOLOGY JUST LK ME, OMG, WTF, BRB, BFF, ETC! So maybe the whole thing is just context.

At any rate, True Blood’s take on the nosferatu mythology borrows from a lot that’s come before it with a fair amount of irreverence. This is a show that doesn’t take vampires with a huge degree of “I HAVE CROSSED OCEANS OF TIME TO FIND YOU” seriousness, but rather in a “Hey, I’m a vampire and I just moved in next door. Can I borrow your internet connection until next Wednesday when mine is installed? I’m having trouble finding an engineer that will come out after sundown.”

We’ve enjoyed our vaguely titillating romp through Bon Temps, a Louisiana town whose freak and monster quotient probably tops just about any in the country save Forks, Washington and libidos run higher than the Mississippi. Vampires like to play Yahtzee! and watch “Lost” and the friendly neighborhood goddess of chaos hosts Friday night orgy and sacrifice parties over at her place. We finished the final episode of the second series, which wrapped up old plotlines and started new ones (“I don’t know who I am! I don’t know where I’m going! I’m so confused! I don’t….oooo, sparkly!”) and left us wondering what will be our next guilty pleasure.

If the last two weeks had a Twitter trending tag it would be #technofail.

Mind you, I have a hugely limited understanding when it comes to the actual physical processes involved in technofail. This is probably because when someone says the word “server”,  my eyes tend to glaze over and I find myself thinking about colorful bits of paper or a happy little tune until I realize that my conversational companion is reaching for a tissue to wipe the drool from my chin. (This is the same thing that happens when someone tries to explain a basic mathematical concept, such as figuring out percentages or fractions, which would explain my abysmal algebra grade as a freshman in high school.)
So, when The Rock Star began last week looking like the back end of a bus, I had only a fraction of the understanding necessary to understand exactly why he looked as though he was about to burst into tears at any moment. I heard words like, “hard drive failure” and “RAID failure” and some choice words being used to describe the parentage of the server maintenance monkeys at the hosting company, but it didn’t quite sink in until The Rock Star mournfully informed me that Blogapotamus was one of the many, many casualties of this data disaster.

The idea of losing 4 years worth of writing had never really crossed my mind as something that would cause me grief, but it did. After frantic examination of my computer, I realized that I probably DID have at least a few years worth saved as text files, but that I’ve become lazy of late and begun writing and publishing directly to WordPress. I realized that I had the same attachment to Blogapotamus that I’ve got for the 2 boxes of cataclysmically embarrassing journals that are languishing in my parent’s basement. Memory is unreliable. Seeing it in black and white is real.

So, as the week progressed, frustration mounted with the abysmal treatment that The Rock Star received from the hosting company, the repair bill from an independent data recovery company began to spiral and the hope of retrieving anything from the badly damaged disks was looking vaguely bleak, I had to try to reconcile myself with losing nearly half a decade’s worth of musings. Rather sweetly, the Rock Star was unduly concerned about the loss of my blog, considering that somewhere, there were rather a lot of people who were climbing the walls and flinging their own excrement in frustration due to the sudden disappearance of their on-line presence, and in some cases, e-mail. (He was at least grateful that none of these people had his phone number. However, the person who’s phone number they DID have definitely had no trouble getting in touch. He feels he owes her a bottle of something strong and intoxicating for fielding these calls.) At any rate, the idea of Blogapotamus simply being GONE and having to start from scratch was something that slowly became less painful to contemplate.

However, all of this grand reconciliation disappeared when the Rock Star began doing the Happy Dance around the flat one evening after being told by the talented data recovery specialist that a good deal of what was lost was now found and that Blogapotamus had emerged unscathed save for two posts and all of the comments. The graphics are intact, but still need uploading. Just out of interest’s sake, the record for most comments (42) goes to a post I did in 2005 on the “psychic” Karina Natalia. Since the post comes up in the first page of Google results under the name, it has been getting steady traffic since it was written. Most of these comments are along the lines of “Thank goodness you told me she’s fake! I almost sent her $$$!” Seriously, folks, if you needed ME to tell you that a psychic that solicits business via mass mailings is a globuous fraud, then you REALLY SHOULDN’T BE ON THE INTERNET.

Blogapotamus lives! New and improved! NOW WITH BACKUP.