havocandmayhem.com

Meg, Beth, I would love to get together with you all for a margarita! DH came home a bit earlier than I expected yesterday and was up for a trip to Chili's. I had the Chambord 1800 margarita. I think I like the strawberry-mango better. The boys were actually very well behaved. Though Havoc did scare us half to death a little later when he just vanished in the Lowe's. He came back to the cart while we were off looking for him. Apparently he had seen something he just *had* to examine. We told him he has to ask us from now on. Priced stoves & washers & dryers. I didn't realize you can get stackables with front load washers! Our current side by side set is 11 years old. The dryer has been having issues but the washes is good for now. We just wanted prices. But now that I know they are available I told DH to just plan on buying the stackabled. The price is the same as a standard front loader (about $800) and I am adamant about getting a front loader when the ...

I've known since April 1 that I had to have that mini album done by the 30th. I started working on it when? The 26th? Starting is very often my problem. I nearly always plan to start something 'later'. I'll even give a specific date sometimes. "I'll start that diet Monday." "I'll start that new budget on payday." and I usually do start when I say I will. I just rarely start something right away. I suppose I do need to figure out when to start the carpet cleaning or it will never get clean. I had about 3 hours of sleep last night. Mayhem came in the room about 2:45a and was restless until almost 5:30a,when he finally fell asleep hogging almost half the bed (which is amazing considering he is 2 and not even 3 feet tall). Havoc came in about 4:45a and never really settled down to sleep again. He just played until I told him to go in the living room around 6am. Then he popped in and out of the bedroom every 20 minutes or so to tell me w...

...if these boys don't nap soon I am going to start pulling my hair out ...this is possibly the longest I have gone without creating a layout since I discovered digi scrapping in Aug 05 ...there is a Higher power & many ways to connect with it ...that we are going to have a great Beltaine ritual & party on Sunday ...that little boys can be just as cuddly as little girls ...they are probably stickier than girls though ...Kerry wouldn't be doing much better of a job if he'd won (I voted Libertarian) ...our county administrators are a bunch of self-serving idiots, by & large, who are afraid to make any actual decisions because it might make a few people upset with them. Everything has been refered for 'study' AGAIN. I don't care if they decide the opposite of what I want, just DECIDE ALREADY!! ...my kitchen floor really needs scrubbed & my carpets shampooed ...that I will do cross stitch this evening instead of cleaning floors ...I am not going to...

I think I would call it routine . It's also fairly quiet & occasionally a bit dull but I like it that way. When things get exciting it usually seems to involve a trip to the ER. So I prefer boredom. :) The women in my MOPS group always tell me "You always have everything so organized in your life. You are right on top of it all." I guess I appear to have it more together than I actually do. and typing this post just reminded me that I was supposed to call a woman for MOPS on Monday & find out what she would like in her gift basket, so I can get it bought for next week's meeting. But I had my day to make dinner for another MOPS mom who just gave birth, switched around on me to Monday, throwing my plans off. I am organized but only as long as nothing alters my plans.

That would be coffee. I must must must have a cup of (non-instant) coffee with real milk & real sugar. No subsititutes allowed. It can be decaf, I don't need the caffine. I need the familiarity, the ritual, the taste & the smell of a cup of coffee. Or I am going to be cranky at least until noon. I *need* to get my brag book quick pages done this week. Yet I am doing everything I can to put it off.

When I was little I knew exactly what my dream job would be. I wanted a desk job. That is right. I wanted to be an office worker. I wanted a 9-5 job that when 5pm came around I could walk away from it, not bring work home. I wanted weekends off, 5 sick days and 2 paid weeks of vacation every year. Occasional overtime was acceptable but I did not want a job that would be my life. There was just nothing I felt that passionate about. I wanted a job to pay the bills & finance whatever interest I currently had. I wanted regularity of hours so I could plan my 'real' life easily around it. I went to work in an office at 23 and held several intersting and not so interesting positions beofre I found my dream job. I worked as a telecom analyst for 800flowers in one of their call centers for 3 years. I was responsible for the call routing & system monitoring the agents performace. I analyzied the systems reports, helped plan staffing needs and the budget. I was paid we...

I have 3 cats. 2 of them are 13 years old and one is 10. One of them, not sure who, has decided that my bathmat & the towel hamper are their litter box. Needless to say, I have been *very* unhappy with the cats. The 2 olders ones are the prime suspects as they have done it before with other objects in the house. If the little has done it, I have never caught her at it. They have just been to the vet so I know nothing physical is wrong with them. There is no way to totally wash out cat urine, so cats can't smell it, so I have thrown out the hamper & the bathmat. This makes 5 bathmats in less than 2 years, in just my bathroom. I've tossed at least one in the main bathroom as well. A couple of times they did get shut in there by a toddler so I view it as an accident but this time I *know* the door was open because I've started propping it open. The vet says it may be psychological & if it becaomes a constant problem there is feline prozac available. One...

That is the topic for this weekend's prompt. That got me thinking about the last paragraph of my previous entry, which I wrote not knowing there was a prompt this weekend. Can you forgive people for frequently irritating you? Do you need to? Is it a big enough issue to warrent a 'forgiveness' as a opposed to just shaking your head, accepting that this person irritates you, and moving on. Is accepting & moving on in itself forgiveness? That is more or less what you do when you forgive someone. You accept what happened & move on. I can't say that I have often said "I forgive you" to anyone. I've said "It happened, its over, lets move on". Which is sorta the same thing, but not quite. There is no absolution in it, the way there seems to be in saying 'I forgive you.' I have said it when people have apologized, but I have never really though "i forgive that person for thier actions." without them saying they were ...

I've got the non-disc reading DVD drive swapped out with my old CD recordable drive. It's reading the discs & copying them at 8x on average. Which means the problem is my DVD-RW drive & not iTunes. I was hoping it was iTunes because it's free. I just got that DVD-RW in December, putting it a month out of warranty. I also have the cover off the PC at the moment so possibly the problem is that things were getting overheated. I suppose I should try copying things with the DVD-RW & see. But 4:50 from Paddington I think is the last one that will fit on the DVD, with everything copied & converted so far. I'll have to test it again & see. DH's truck won't start. We have no clue why. Not good. I set the oven on fire this morning while preheating if for cinnamon rolls. Probably grease from the mini meatloaves on Thursday. However the oven has been having heating issues. Not good either. I have it running the self-clean cycle now. I'm ...

and I can think beyond the dental horror I want to get back to scrapping. I copied all the Top 10 CK layouts to my desktop & I think I will do some scraplifting tomorrow. I'd like to finish copying Under the Tuscan Sun to my cd to convert it, but my DVD drive seems to be having issues. It will copy 1-2 discs ok, at its usual speed, but about 2/3 the way through the second disc or when I put in a 3rd, it slows down to a crawl. It goes from a rate of 5.8x to 0.8x and suddenly needs 100% of the CPU to do it. I have to turn off the PC and walk away for awhile, then I can reboot, and copy 2 more CDs, then repeat. Tuscan Sun is 10 cds long. I have 5 done so far. Needless to say I cannot open PSP at the same time. I'm not sure what is going on. Also my other older DVD drive seems to have stopped working all together. I put a disc in, any disc & it doens't see it. I guess I need to replace it with my old CD drive. I hope I didn't toss it in my last cleaning...

This is a photo of my DH, taken at 4:15pm today. He is taking a well deserved nap. He worked late yesterday, came home, put the boys to bed, and then continued working until 2am. While he was working Mayhem was up for about 90 minutes of that time due to his cold. Then DH got up with Havoc at 6:30am, while Mayhem slept with me until *a. DH did not go into the office today but worked from home so he could watch the boys while I was at the dentist. He planned on staying home after I go back because I am usually a bit 'fragile' after dental experiences. The boys went down for their naps at 1p and DH worked until 4 when I asked to used the computer. He sat on the sofa & promptly fell asleep. I've got the boys watching Backyardigans in our room to keep them from waking him up. The root canal went well for the most part. Thanks everyone for your good thoughts. :) I did start crying as soon as I sat in the chair but the endodontist (I think that is what she is called, s...

Good topic since I am currently immersed in converting my audiobooks to mp3s. My favorite author of all time is the late Douglas Adams. The 42 in my various user names is in his honor and my second son is indirectly named for a character in 2 of his books. Mayhem was going to be named Dirk, for Dirk Gently, but he just didn't look like a 'Dirk' so we named him Mayhem. I have been reading a lot of travel anthologies lately. I just finished A Woman's Europe and am now reading A Woman's Path which is a collection of essays about spiritual travels/pilgrimages made by women around the world. I have "the Best of Travel Writing 2005" waiting to be read next. I am currently listening to Dave Barry Does Japan on my iPod at the gym & in my car. Next up is 'A Year in the World" by Frances Mayes who also wrote Under the Tuscan Sun. I have both the paperback & the audio of Under the Tuscan Sun. I only listen to unabridged books. Mostly because ...

Most of scrapping inspiration comes from scraplifting or sketches. I don't usually follow them completely; you might see something of the original in what I end up with but I never follow anything totally (which is why I cannot crochet a sweater pattern to save my life...always fiddling with things, even wheni am really *trying* to stickto the pattern). But they give me a starting point. A color, a alpha, a way of organizing photos or placing journaling, that I then work around. I haven't been very inspired lately though by anything. I have this big sword hanging over my head, blighting my life & taking over my mind (I exaggerate for humor, god knows I need it) of the ROOT CANAL on Friday at 10:50a. I cannot really do anything in the least creative right now & I have tried. I'd love to get it off my mind for awhile but it seems to have sucked up all my inventive memory with replaying moment by painful moment all the worst parts of my 3 previous root canals in ...

Where to begin......There are so many projects in the works around here. On a house wide level, we are working on the yard. We have a 5 year plan for the yard. This is year 4. When we moved in we had no front yard. We had a huge gravel parking area. Over the past 3 years we have converted a chunk of that parking area to grass, built a covered patio, built a playyard & gotten one of those 15 foot blow up ring pools. This year we are framing in & backfilling an area off the side of the driveway to be the new pakring area. We also have to dig out part of the hillside onvthe other side of the drive & put up a low retaining wall. We will then reclaim the final part of the old parking area in front of the house and move the playyard over to it. We are using railroad ties for the framing & retaining walls. Next year we will run the ties all the way down to the road (have to dig out a trench to set them in) and then put up one of those metal carports over the new park...

How do you cope with a change in plans? Not very well actually. I like for there to be plans. I like for those plans to be followed. I like to have backup plans in case the first plan falls through. It does depend on just what the thing is. I'll roll with a restaurant being closed unexpectedly or toddler tales being cancelled for snow. I'm disappointed but I can work with it easily enough. But something big like a flight getting cancelled or other travel/vacation plans getting changed throw me pretty hard at first. I get upset (angry or sad) for a bit, but then I move on to solving the problem. I'll probably complain about it for awhile afterwards too. I have my spontaneous moments, but they are few.

Tuesday we had the leftovers Wednesday we had pasta w/metballs (leftover mini meatloaf from last month, frozen) Thursday we were going to have the chicken strips but it turned out they were fish strips. note to self - Label the stuff before putting it in freezer. Friday we had Osaka carry out - steak & chicken hibachi plus sushi & miso soup Today we had steak & spinich salad. Steak onthe grill. YUUMMM! and just enough left over for a steak sandwich for lunch on Monday. Tomorrow I don't know what we are doing for dinner. Maybe we will go to the Chinese buffet place in C-ville. I'd assume most restaurants are open even though it is Easter, but I am positive the buffet place is. I have a Jewish friend who, when asked about what they have for Xmas dinner, says "We've gone out for Chinese since I was a kid" Maybe we'll make that our Easter thing.

Lots of random stuff this weekend. We don't celebrate Easter & Havoc is just now getting old enough to realize there are Easter baskets. He doesn't realize yet that most people get them & he doesn't. I suspect that will be next year. We do go to the egg hunts & things, and really there is nothing religious about an Easter basket. So I guess it needs to be an all or nothing thing, because I can't really explain why he can hunt eggs with his friends but not get a basket of candy. Tricky thing about being a minority religion. But, like Xmas, the fact that they re on different dates does help me keep a distance between religious & secular holidays. I guess it is just the former Catholic in me, but despite the bunnies & the eggs I have never really viewed easter as a secular holiday. Xmas, oh yeah, BIG secular holiday. Easter, not so much. I have to go get new curtain rods, the big heavy (and expensive) kind that the boys won't be able to be...

It is to write about flowers. Flowers...not something I think about much or write about ever. So I think I am going to have go with randomness on this topic. DH & the boys bought me flowers last week. White daisies that had been died blue by putting them in blue water and some purple flowersas part of the bouquet. I have no idea what sort of flowers the purple ones are. I have every rose DH has ever given me, dried & stored in 2 large plastic containers. At some point I am going to make rose beads out of them. I just had to spend as much in shipping as the cost of the bouquet to send my mom flowers for her birthday because I ordered them yetesterday instead of on Monday. Her birthday is tomorrow & they had tobe delivered today. I used to work for 1-800flowers in a local call center as the telcom analyst & call flow director.

"This too shall pass" I've been hearing this my whole life from the people around me. Often it is said of the good things as well as the bad, which I think is a bit unique among my friends. Most people just say it when something bad or a struggle of some sort is going on. But we also say it when something good is happening, as a reminder to savor the moment.

Havoc must have had an interesting dream last night He told me this morning that a cat monster was going to visit us. Just a little baby one, but it was going to drive over to play with us. It lived a long way away. When we were coming home from the gym he mentioned it again & I suggested maybe it would nap with him but he said cat monsters only sleep on pasta, not in beds. Some of this I can explain. When Havoc went through a phase of being afraid of monsters a few months ago I first told him that monsters only live in California (Dh adding that the whacky liberals out there have all these monster protection laws in place so the monsters like living there best of all places - DH is a little nuts sometimes) Later I told Havoc that even if monsters were around here, they wouldn't stay because they are afraid of cats & our 3 cats would chase them away. He decided that Nefer was the cat who really didn't like monsters (Nefer doesn;t really like anyone) & that seemed to...

Chicken strips - homemade w/ginger soy glaze Steak & spinich salad Mini meatloaf (w/extras for ST's family on monday) Pasta w/meatballs (leftover meatloaf) Pizza Shrimp Toast (maybe) Grilled Polenta w/salad Sweet potato & chicken salad Braciole Baked salmon Roast Chicken meatball soup We'll probably cookout one Sunday & go out to eat on Saturdays. DH won't be home for dinner tonight, so I think we will have the leftover santa fe chicken couscous chopped up into chicken patties, breaded & pan fried. I'll add some spinich to it. i have to plan the 2 week menu. Otherwise I spend way too much at the grocery store & end up wasting leftovers. It's really helped my budget & we eat better meals now. Before we had kids I was always planning dinner. It was a big deal for me. I'd ask DH at 10am what he wanted for dinner. After DS1 was born I had less tiem to cook. After DS2, and I was sick for so long, I just cooked at random. We ate a lot...

Big F, little f, what begins with F? I had that as a journal title on Ovusoft for awhile, both because my week was sucking & my BG, the Freaks, were being extra Freaky that week, playing a guessing game using our childhood photos as avatars. Wow! that was like 2 years ago! F always does remind me of freak. Both because of the Freaks and because I say 'freaking' in place of a less appropriate word. I had a lot of fun with Freaks. We did let ourselves get tangled up in some stupid stuff because of a certain AW, and after SEW split we seemed to gain all the negative focus and then there was the whole Heffa debacle, but much of the supposed 'trouble' we caused was really in the minds of others. Especially the avis. So many of the avis that various people were about them we just us playing around. Inside jokes, nothing to do with anyone. Like the Peeps. We had no idea there even was a BG called Peeps. It was just Wonker & Jill playing around with Yahoo d...

I've journaled ever since I was 10. I've taken photos since about that age as well. I've combined them in various photo albums oer theyears, the 'sticky backed' kind but I was never really a scrapbooker. I've always found paper scrapbooking interesting but I lacked the time & patience for it. The predone plopper pages were never quite right but I wasn't going to gobuy a bunch of stuff to make things the way I wanted. I've never been a paper crafty sort of person. Yarn, yes, paper, no. Digi scrapping was the answer to my needs. Once I discovered DSP and classes for PSP I jumped right into it. I like being able to tell the story that goes with the photo - what I was thinking, what the person was thinking, being able to convey atmosphere in my pages & express my creativity. I also like that I am saving memories. We have so many photos from my grandparents & IL's that have just a date or a name. Some of them have names but no one k...

Today's DSP blog challenge is to write about something you don't like doing but do anyway. I am actually working on a layout about this for the current Scrap Therapy challenge on Scrapmommies.com. It is to scrap something you are afraid of. I don't like going to the dentist because I am afraid of it. Actually that sentance does not begin to convey just how I feel about the dentist. Terror & hysteria come closer. I had some really bad dental experiences about a decade ago that pushed a mild, slightly higher than average dislike of the dentist into outright fear. I have a hard time walking into the dentists' office. It's all I can do not to start crying with fear just sitting in the waiting room, let alone keeping it together while someone is poking around my mouth. I *know* they are going to hurt me. They may not do it intentionally, they even try to avoid it, but they always end up hurting me. Even cleaning my teeth, soemthing pokes too hard or scrapes...

I did this layout for the current Scrappy Chat challenge at DSP. The challenge was to use at least 3 patterned papers in a layout. I used one of the pages of a QuickPage set I created for 1hourscraps. I used Christina Bartholomews Simple Gifts kit tocreate teh quick pages. This is the right side page. I am going to make the left side page about my grandfather, as soon as i get the photos from my dad.

Meg is running a new challenge at DSP to keep everyone journaling. Her topic this time was to write about your birthday. I don't write about my birthdays often. As an adult they are generally nothing too special. We go out to dinner & I pick the place. We do this for the boys' birthdays as well. DH's is on Dec 31st & we have a party for him or we would go out to eat as well. I get nice gifts, almost always whatever I have asked for. Your birthday is *your* day in our house. You decide what we are going to do, what you want for breakfast, lunch, dinner (within reason), what we watch on TV. It is all about *you* on your birthday. The only thing that I am insistant about is that we do the birthday celebration *on the day* of the birthday. Even if it is inconvenient. Ok, *especially* if it is inconvenient. See, my birthday is in July and when I was a kid my younger brother played Little League all summer. His games came before everything. Didn't matter...

It's only taken me 4 days of websearching, editing & trial and error, but I finally have this blog appearing properly in Firefox as well as IE. I don't know what it looks like in Mac & can't find out easily. Maybe if someone using a Mac stops by they will leave a comment & let me know. Not that there is any reason really for people to stop by. I don't have anything really interesting or exciting going on here yet. But eventually I'd like to do freebies & maybe contests from time to time. But step 2 is to get the site looking ok in nearly all browsers (step 1 being the 3 column thing). Step 3 is just using the blog regularly. Step 4 would be the sharing of freebies (that I have yet to design, that being a step in a completely different list)