havocandmayhem.com

I've been busy getting this calendar together. I'm getting it professionally printed this year at Artscow, rather than do it myself, so I must be on the ball about this. I made these pages with Kim Hill's Storyboard set and her Companion Phrases sets, both available at Scrapbook-Elements.  Some of the pages also use kits by Lauren Grier, Misty Cato & Eve Kipler at Sweet Shoppe Designs

We started the week off with Havoc cutting himself while shaving. (Really. He found DH's razor. My heart is still pounding.) Then there was Bat Mayhem Man Using his super powers The dinos did some arts & crafts Havoc was an Indian for Thanksgiving And we got the tree decorated         Visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom for more weekly winners. With this post I have completed all 30 days of NaBloPoMo! Check in tomorrow to see what I am up to next!

We set up the tree today, which is a week earlier than usual, but we won't be here for the week of Christmas so we figured we might as well do it now and get the added enjoyment of it. All of the traditional things went into it. The dragging out of boxes from their long storage in clothing closets The finding of clothing long missing because it fell behind the boxes The mad rush to open the ornament & light boxes and spread it all around the living room & the attendant rush to prevent that happening. The unpacking and unfolding of the tree The hunt for the power cord The hanging of the ornaments by the boys along with the accompanying telling of the stories behind the ornaments (we have a lot of ornaments from our own childhoods) The correction of ornament placement (the boys have a tendency to put 2-3 ornaments on one branch) The taking of photos by DH, with the yearly dying of the batteries (both the new Nikon D40 and the old Olympus had their batteries ...

I admit I was planning on making reservations. But they were all buffets and buffets simply are not cost effective for my little picky eaters, not when kids 4 and up cost $10.95.  There are not enough bread rolls on a buffet to cost justify that amount. (adults were $16.95, which is about right for me and DH comes out ahead, but not sufficiently ahead to offset the $22 for the kids). So I did,in the end, make Thanksgiving dinner. We had a meal out of Rachel Ray's November magazine - the Thanksgiving every day section.  We had ground turkey patties with mashed sweet potatoes & gravy and salad. We also had brie and bread. True to form Havoc picked at everything and Mayhem ate the salad. Both of them ate the bread. Mayhem was eventually pressured into a bite of turkey & sweet potato. And my mother wonders why I make reservations. Speaking of my mother, I didn't use her pie recipe when I made pumpkin pie. Mom's recipe is - Go to Sams. Buy a pumpkin pie in the ba...

I know today the whole world is putting up meaningful heartfelt posts of thing they are thankful for, but I'm not so good at meaningful heartfelt expressions with words. I think I come over sounding all cheesy, trite and a tad bit pathetic. So let me just say I love you all and am grateful for all that is good and comforting in my life and know that I mean it from the heart. I'd bake you all muffins to show my appreciation if it were in my power to get muffins to you all. I hope everyone has a great day!

I envision this conversation between my sons, some Thanksgiving far in the future, when they are sitting around the table with their children & grandchildren. Havoc: Remember the savory mashed sweet potatoes? Mayhem: What about the apricot glazed turkey? Havoc: the one with the cornbread & oyster stuffing? Mayhem: No the sourdough and fig stuffing. Havoc: Oh yeah. I'm thinking of the stuffed maple turkey breast. How about the prime rib that one time? Mayhem: with the horseradish mashed potaotes! Havoc: *sigh* Our mom made the best reservations didn't she? Mayhem: Yeah, no one could dial like our mom. She was a wizard with the phonebook. Havoc: Remember the time Dad did Thanksgiving dinner? *laughter* Together: Waffle House!!! I don't *do* Thanksgiving dinner you see. We go to my folks in Florida for a week every year, we alternate between Thanksgiving and Xmas. Mom controls Thanksgiving. Attempts to help or change or add anything to the men...

The boys go through a shocking number of clothes in a day right now. It's muddy out and cold. So instead taking off their shirts & tees to play in the mud, they now layer on a couple of shirts, long pants, socks and jackets. Then they somehow get mud through all those layers in about 30 minutes. These are children who shriek with horror if they get some drops of water on their shirt while washing their hands. The shirt CANNOT be worn any more. It is too WET & DIRTY with that drop of water on it. Imagine how they react to real mud and actual dampness. They must have changed clothes 5 times each over the weekend. I washed their clothes on Sunday but somehow their laundry basket is full again. It hasn't even been 48 hours.

There are times where I wish I could say "I made my mother's ragu, handed down through the generations from mother daughter. It's an old family tradition from the Old Country." But we're Irish & German, have been here since 1780 or so, and my foremothers embraced the convenience of early modern agribusiness prior to WWII with a startling eagerness. Oh there were jars of home canned stuff in my Nan's larder when I was a child, but no one had seen her can a thing after 1951. Tellingly perhaps, I cannot remember any of the jars every being opened, let alone eaten. This is my family's traditional ragu. It even says 'traditional' right on the label. I'm rather fond of it actually. There are so few 'family recipes' in my background that I take what I can get. But sometimes, usually around now, when it gets really cold for the first time in months, the complete lack of Italian blood in me calls out for a dish of rich meaty ra...

Our leaves went brown very quickly So I said the heck with it and played with photo effects Mayhem's got a little captain in him Jurassic Bathtime We also had a light dusting of snow briefly on Thursday Visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom for more weekly winners

So far I am doing good. I made a promise to myself this year when I decided to do NaBloPoMo again - no memes or themes, apart from Weekly Winners. If I was going to do this, I was going to do it with my own ideas, not posts prompted by others. Plus only one post allowed about how hard NaBloPoMo was getting & how I had no ideas to post. I was going to come up with 25 posts of my own creation, 23 of which had to be about something other than NaBloPoMo. I wanted to do the month of writing (NatNoWriMo, or something like that), but I'm not ready to commit to that much writing yet, so I compromised with this structure. I'm feeling pretty good about it. All my posts so far, apart from Weekly Winners have been ideas of my own devising and I was blessed that they came to me relatively easily. I have a several sheets of a notepad filled with topic ideas that will last me through November and farther. One is an idea to live tweet our 2 day drive to Florida next month and then do a...

I am a comparison grocery shopper. I have a Safeway, several Food Lions & a Walmart available to me for groceries. One of the Food Lions is grossly overpriced, but if I need to be in that area, south of my house, it is the only option except the Amish market. I do my best to avoid this Food Lion for anything but Hornsby Crisp Apple Hard Cider. It is the only Food Lion that carries it, the others only carry the regular Hornsby Apple Hard Cider.  Safeway and Wal Mart do not carry hard cider, neither do the Amish. Cider is my favorite beverage so you can imagine I must plot my grocery shopping with care, stocking up on what is available & what is best priced at each store as I visit them in rotation. One week finds me getting my baking needs, butter & bulk grains with the Amish, a quick run in to overpriced Food Lion for several 6 packs of cider and anything advertised on sale in the paper that I need at the time (they have to honor the sale prices but everything else in...

I've been scrapping a lot this week. But I can't show you what I have been doing yet. I can say that Traci Reed has something great coming this weekend at SSD and Kim Hill has some really nice stuff coming to Scrapbook Elements at the end of the month. I've also gone through my crochet patterns & have some holiday ones in the works. Right now I am crocheting fruit & veggies to sit in my fruit bowl now that fresh local fruit season is over. I also have a snowman in a couple different sizes to do and I am making little poppets, one of each of us, for xmas tree ornaments. though I am still deciding on how to do the hair. And of course Mayhem is still nagging me about the crochet dinosaurs he wants. I've sorted through the toddler bedsheets for the quilts, the ones I made, the ones I bought, plus the additional kiddie fabric I bought intending to make into sheets. I'm going to go with large patchwork squares, strip pieced together, which should go fai...

Havoc has been talking about some of the kids in his class and some on the bus who have little MP3 players. Kindergartners with MP3 players....oh-kay. I thought I was a few years away from this. Not so much the kids having the MP3 player as taking it to school & back.  My kids are always losing and or breaking things so the idea that I might give them some expensive electronics to take out of the house & away from my help just never crossed my mind. But then I found a $9 1GB MP3 player that has 4 buttons. OH! OKAY! See, I'm not up on the technology at the lower end of the price & size scale. Last time I went looking for a player it had to have at least 40GB and play videos (and not be an iPod because while I will surrender to Google running the online world I am not surrendering to iPod controlling the music & video world. Plus the software uses to damn much RAM) So I had no idea you could get them that cheap & easy to use. I though getting Havoc one for...

1. Mayhem & I are at the store today. I was getting light bulbs, because our bulbs pop en masse rather that one at a time and there were only 2 bulbs at home. Mayhem was asking about the types of bulbs and what lights needed new ones. Then he says "wW need a one in our room too Mama" me: "I didn't notice that last night" Mayhem: "it got popped out last night. not broken, just popped out" something about that statement made me go hhmmmm.... me: "so how'd it get popped out?" Mayhem "it got whacked by the long neck dinosaur when it went flying by." There are so many places I could go from there I couldn't decide on a starting point and decided to just drop it. FYI...bunk beds and small bedrooms with ceiling fans can cause unexpected 'issues' 2. Mayhem & I are leaving the gym. He'd been in the playcare area for a little over an hour. Me: So did you have fun? Mayhem: I had a good day Me...

I went with a couple of GFs yesterday on an outing. We drove an hour to go to Wegmans. Wegmans is a totally cool, huge grocery store & I enjoyed being there enormously because we just don't get much variety here with Safeway & Food Lion, especially in produce or in prepared food - like stuffed flank steak, you just need to cook. The 3 of us did some regular grocery shopping plus bought stuff for a big dinner our 3 families had that night.  I spent $125 and came in considerably lower that the other 2. But I only bought 2 bottles of wine. As much fun as I had there & as much as I am looking forward to going again - when did going to a different grocery store become an exciting & fun thing to do?  This is now the wild thing I do with my GFs. *sigh*

I took my new camera and the boys for a photo shoot around the yard These guys came along too. Havoc took their picture Visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom for more Weekly Winners

We have all the bunk bed parts. Last night we went over how we were going to assemble it today. The boys talked about the merits of Batman sheets versus Spiderman sheets while I shook out the various fleece blankets they have to see what would fit a twin bed and what was too small. I'm going to have a large lot of toddler fitted sheets to offer on eBay. I mentioned this to DH and Mayhem suddenly became concerned. "You give away my truck sheets?" I explained the sheets won't fit on the new mattresses so we won't need them any longer. Mayhem threw himself on his bed (with truck sheets) and sobbed "BUT I WUV MY TRUCK SHEETS!!!" Oh dear. Deciding to go with the 'ripping the bandaid off quickly' approach, I told him that when the bunk bed were set up, we would be removing his toddler bed and wouldn't need it or the sheets so we will be giving them away and I tried to remind him of how excited he was about the bunk beds and Batman sheets. H...

I went to the library yesterday and I checked out a mere 4 books. They told me I only had 9 other items checked out. This is the least amount of books I have had out of the library in over 2 years. Mayhem and I go to the library nearly every week. If Havoc is out of school he comes with us. Yesterday I went alone, which explains the 4 measly books. I get 3-6 books every time. Mayhem gets 2-4 books and a couple of videos. Havoc gets the same if he is with us, otherwise I pick out a couple books for him. On average I leave with 10 items every week. During the summer I leave with as many as 22. We return the books we have read whenever we go, but we never read all of them in a week. Then we check out more books and they move the due date of the last batch to the new batch. Next week bring back a few more, maybe some from the past week, maybe some from the previous weeks. All the outstanding books are then moved to the new batch's due date. Repeat, week after week, unless a rare h...

To you desperate people in the refi and home equity department: Please share notes about customers. Please read the customer history. It will save us both endless amounts of time, money and the lives of several trees in bulk mailings, if you would just do a little looking around before contacting me. I realize it drives you home equity people nuts when you see that, according to your records, I have over $75,000 in equity in my house. That's equity I could be paying you interest on! And I have the audacity not to have contacted you asking to have my debt load increased. You feel you are doing me a favor by contacting me and telling me all about how I could borrow against that equity and pay off high interest credit cards or remodel the house or pay for the kids college.  There are a couple of problems with this pitch. Please, make note of them in your customer database. First, those high interest credit cards of mine that you are so worried about? There is one, and it would c...

Last night about 10pm I got very cold. Very very cold. Not really shaking with chills but I just couldn't get warm. I went to bed in long johns under 3 blankets & kept waking up every hour or so with my muscles aching from being clenched with cold while I slept. This went on until about 3am when suddenly to was too hot to stand & then it was cold again & then it went away and I slept for a few hours. I felt ok when woke up but then about 5 minutes later I had to get back into bed because I was shaking & felt weak in the muscles. I have no fever and now I feel pretty good, just a bit cold, despite wearing a shirt and fleece pullover. But I don't trust my muscles enough to take Body Pump today. There is a chance I'd feel warm & good after class and there is a chance that halfway into it I'd have to leave because I can't lift anything. I don't feel achy, but I feel the potential to be achy if you know what I mean. I may do some WiiFit after Mayh...

DH lost his wallet Friday. In that wallet, along with his license & credit cards was a list of our checking account numbers.  The bank got right on it and set us up with new accounts and by Sunday everything was transferred to these new accounts and all our auto transfers and BillPays were transferred as well.  They just transferred the new account to my check card rather than issue me a new one. That is about 85% of our bill payments taken care of with no effort on my part. Thank goodness. However there is that other 15% - those few accounts who for whatever reason are direct debiting our checking account or who were given DH's check card number to debit.  Problem is I have no idea how some of our accounts are billing us (my card? his card? direct debit?), and since the new accounts were opened I have no statement history to go look at and see. So I have to call them. Our long distance company saved me the problem by calling me (they had DH's now canceled card), ...

I've been shopping a lot lately. One of the boys' Xmas presents is a bunk bed. We've been planning this for awhile & putting some aside for it because GEEZ! bunk beds are expensive and that is without the mattresses. I tried Craigslist but any decent looking used one was as much as a lower end new one & I wasn't really seeing any reason but style behind the costs of the higher end ones, especially since I wanted a simple light colored wood one that could convert to 2 beds. And mattresses! OMG! it's like you can have $80 crap mattress or a $300 decent one. Admittedly we spent $1100 on our queen sized Comforpedic, but we don't have bed wetting issues. Nor do we jump up and down on them or use them as springboards for superman leaps. I just want a good solid mattress that will stand up to years of boys. Once we're safely past the bed wetting I'll get them some memory foam covers for the mattresses.  Oh yeah, and I have to buy sheets, blankets and ...

I got a new camera on Tuesday, a Nikon D40. I immediately started taking photos as soon as the battery was charged. The coffee station/bakers rack in the kitchen was immediately available Then I moved around and zoomed in on the cookbooks And the coffee pot And the coffee mugs hhmmm.... and the coffee canister I think someone was in the smiley stickers Probably this guy The sleeping cat warrior.... AWAKES! Visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom for more Weekly Winners

Not the "you're it" kind, but the labeling kind I have ACDSee Photo Manager . I've had it for almost 2 years now I think. I think they have upgraded a couple times since I bought it but I'm happy with what mine does & would rather spend the $35 upgrade on digi supplies. That's what I use it for most - tagging digital scrapbooking supplies. I have about 28GBs of digi scrap stuff (which is NOTHING in some digi circles, I know people who are maxing out 250GB EHDs with stuff) and I have it all neatly organized in folders by type and everything is tagged in ACDSee so I don't have to keep opening all those folders in search of the elusive doodled star shaded slightly blue that would look perfect on my layout. I just click the tags for doodle & star and up they all come.  I did intend at some point to go back and add the 'blue' tag but I'm good with how I have it now. What I had not been using the Photo Manager for was um..managing my p...

I just recently spent $400 on a new camera. The camera did not come with a bag & it needs a bag.  I'm sure we'd all agree that you don't just toss a $400 camera on the seat of your car and go. You put it in a camera bag first, then toss it on the seat. The bag should have various pockets inside and out for holding cords and other lenses. It should be sturdy & well padded. And it should be cute.  A $15 pleathor bag from Wal Mart will not do, unless you are very crafty and can make a slipcover to go over it. So off to Etsy I went in search of a cute camera bag of the right size. I was a bit startled by the prices but after looking at bags in Wal Mart and thinking about just how I would sew fabric to it and how long it would actually take and how much fabric I would go through before I was finished because me & scissors do not get along & I'd be sure to botch the cutting at least once, I decided that while I can't spend $90 on a bag, $60 was rea...

There are all these random odd things about my kids' school that probably aren't odd, I just don't understand them.  My latest is school lunches. Buying lunch was never an option in my 12 years of Catholic schooling. The school I went to for the first 8 years didn't have a lunch room let alone a cafeteria. You brought your lunch and you ate at your desk.  The high school had a lunch room and a cafeteria that served breakfast to people who qualified for free breakfast, but no lunch. The school was in the middle of town though and you were free to leave and go to the deli or McDonalds. (I'd like to see that happen today) So I have zero experience with cafeterias. Lunch is $1.70. Havoc buys lunch on random days if they are serving something he likes  - tacos, chicken sandwiches or hot dogs usually. I can't just hand him $2 to stick in his pocket. I understand that. Trusting a bunch of 5 year olds not to lose their lunch money or their change would be foolish. I...

I took some shots while waiting for the kids' bus yesterday afternoon Very clear photos, unretouched I'm liking the macro setting and the no flash setting seems less inclined to blur Do I need to wash my coffee maker or what? This is embarrassing. I'm liking the in camera editing too. This time of year the flash is needed inside and given the light wood cabinets, light wood floors, light wood furniture and the yellow living room walls my photos are already inclined to have a yellow hue even without the flash Unretouched retouched in camera only Overall I'm pretty pleased, though it will take me some time to get used to looking through a viewfinder again. I've been looking at a display screen for 6 years.  Put the camera up to your face and look through the little window? Seriously? People do that? I also need a cool bag for it. I'd thought one came with the package I got but I read that wrong. WooHoo! bag shopping!!!

It took me all of about 60 seconds to vote. There were 20 cars in the lot but they must have belonged to the people manning tables by the roadside and the dozen or so folks working for the precinct. It seemed a bit overstaffed to say the least. I showed them my ID, noticed DH had voted earlier (#112), got my card (#306, I didn't realize there were 300 people in my precinct, let alone they would have voted already) and made my 3 choices (we only had President, Senator and Representative to elect this time. No bond issues or anything). It took me longer to tweet about it than it did to do it. I hadn't realized Nader had made it onto the ballot here, nor that the Constitution Party candidate, Chuck Baldwin,  had made it either (and why are they listed as Independent Greens?) They managed to put someone up for Senator as well. Then I went and got a bacon chili cheese dog, which took much longer to get than it did vote. You want to talk lines? Stop by the General Store at lunch ...