havocandmayhem.com

A few months ago I wrote about my internal debate between Vanity & Common Sense over hair color. The end result was that after weeks of thought I bought a box of color and a few more days of dithering, I actually used the color. Now that it is 3 months later I naturally have some root issues.  But this isn’t about that. It  is about that internal debate though. I have naturally wavy hair.  Stupid looking waves at that.  No matter the cut may hair is too wavy to hang right and not wavy enough to really curl. I got my first perm at 13 to correct this problem.  For the next 15 years I alternated between periods of perm curls and periods of flat iron straightness. It just depended on which was less effort to achieve. (Common Sense holds the long term decisions. Vanity knows it’s not worth the fight) The perm would be nice & curly for a couple months & then it would start to require a lot of mousse & gel and a diffuser …. Then it would be easier to...

As I am now a pagan this has no real meaning to me. But as a former Catholic I still have this vague feeling that I ought to be at Mass, or coming up with something to give up or going to confession. Lent always reminds me of confession There is some sort of rule about going to confession during Lent so you can go to communion during the year as I recall. Possibly the rules have changed. It’s been awhile Forgive me father for I have sinned. It has been…hmm…1981 I think…so it’s been 28 years since my last confession & I’ve been busy since then coveting and having other gods before me. I’m fairly sure you don’t even have to say that bit anymore. I was in Catholic school for 12 years and we went to confession twice a year from grade 2 to 8 and once a year after. (Which is odd really because the potential to sin increases once you are teen, especially the venal ones.  Do they still differentiate venal from mortal?) I always found confession to be an unsatisfying experienc...

I love cereal. My husband loves cereal. My kids love cereal. Cereal is a family affair. It can be breakfast, or lunch, or snack, or even dessert. If I am home alone, it often is dinner. Sometimes it is a late night snack. It can be eaten dry or soaked in milk. I prefer it with milk but the males tend to eat it dry. My favorite is Honey Nut Cheerios. Mayhem likes Reese’s Puffs and Havoc & DH are partial to Cinnamon Toast Crunch.  We’re a General Mills sort of family. DH & I both grew up on Coca Puffs, Kix, Cookie Crisp and Lucky Charms. He takes issue with Cookie Crisp these days day so we don’t buy it but the rest of them appear in rotation in our cupboards. It never lasts long.  General Mills sent me a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch to review last Thursday. It was gone by Saturday evening. Cinnamon toast is one of DH’s favorite snack. Cinnamon Toast Crunch saves him waiting for the bread to toast and he doesn’t have to get a knife dirty spreading butter. Breakfast o...

There seems to be a lot of food this week. My favorite beverage I made granola bars We went to Buffalo Wild Wings for 99 cent kid meal night The balloon dinosaur had some fried mushrooms I went to Sam’s This guy came with me to make sure I didn’t forget the dino nuggets Havoc’s weekly winner For more Weekly Winners please visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom

I figure since I am going to stress about this flying thing in the back of my mind anyway I might as well be proactive & pick a specific thing to focus on.  Something I can actively control. Today it is LUGGAGE. Should I check a bag or save myself the bag checking & retrieving hassle by shipping our clothes UPS? The cost is about the same really, since US Airways charges $15 to check a bag and UPS charged me $25 to ship 2 boxes to my folks over Christmas. UPS will actually ship the suitcase, no box required. It's not like we'll be needing those shorts & tees I am packing for another 4-6 weeks after we return. But there is the toiletries issue. We'll need the toiletries right up until we leave and TSA has made flying with shampoo, toothpaste, mascara & hair gel a bit of a challenge. I didn't really think about how much personal care stuff I have until I considered the number of 3oz bottles I would need to find. Shampoo, face cleanser, razor (which w...

I am sort of a foodie and I am a parent. I follow food blogs and food forums and parenting blogs and parenting forums. This means I am constantly running into the food police “You aren’t eating *that* are you?” “You wouldn’t let your child eat *this* would you?” Actually, yes I probably am and would. I’m one of those moderation people who doesn’t think food is evil or a magic cure all. If you believe every food related story out there nearly all foods will kill you, if they don’t make you live to be 100, except for those that they thought would make you live to be 100 but turns out they will kill you – or maybe not (eggs anyone?). And if they aren’t currently killing you or making you live to be 100 they are poisoned with salmonella. Food just can’t be trusted. I stopped paying attention a long time ago, apart from the salmonella stories & I just buy what my picky eaters will eat. Sometimes I go for the organic versions, like apples, but mostly I buy what is cheapest. The o...

This one is for my hubby, who is one hell of a guy and has put up with my general life obliviousness for nearly 20 years. He does the dishes. He cooks dinner for the boys at least once a week. He got up and brought the babies to me or fed the babies bottles at night. He’d changed more diapers than I had by the time DS1 was 2 weeks old & continued to change at least a quarter of them. He does nearly all the driving when we go on a trip. He took the broken toilet to the dump in a prompt and timely manner. He brings me flowers for no reason. He loves me in spite of myself. and most of all….. he got my internet fixed in time for Valentine’s day (that’s him on the ground) Thanks honey for all you do for me. A Jay and Deb Production.

Our gym offers a Parents Night Out babysitting event once a month. It lasts from 3 to 4 hours & costs about $8 an hour for the 2 kids together. They had one Saturday from 4-8pm. Four hours without the kids for only $32? Sign us up! But then there is the problem of what to do for 4 hours. It was Valentine’s Day so we made dinner reservations for 5pm at the Thai place. We wandered around the library for about a half hour then browsed an extremely pricy for the crap they were selling ‘antique’ store for a bit, then went to dinner. It was a nice dinner, but we were done at 5:45 & still had over 2 hours of non-refundable childcare to use. So we did what couples all over the area do on Saturday nights. We went to Wal Mart. We spent a romantic hour or so looking at cheap dressers and tents and big screen TVs and sorting through rechargeable batteries hoping to find one that fit any of our cameras. We bought milk. Then we went to Target. And did more of the same, except for t...

I've got quite a few photos this week to make up for last week. My internet went out Wednesday evening when a windstorm had gusts strong enough to actually rip the guy wires out of the ground and topple the 50 foot pole that holds our receiver. Normally it just blows the antenna around like a weathervane but this time it was strong enough to bend the pole and pull it down Because of the bend it is no longer collapsible, so we can’t re-erect it ourselves. We needed one of these Just to give you an idea of scale There is no way boys can resist a giant bucket truck Erecting the pole, (they eventually got it straight but the sun was setting so I didn’t get a photo) Not only are my boys fighting with sticks, they are doing it on the roof. I know this looks like a Tonka truck with dinosaurs in it but actually it is an AT-AT full of storm troopers. (we’ve been in major Star Wars mode here lately.) It’s under attack by rebel pilots Curse you rebels!!...

The Windy defeats me again! At least it didn't wreck my car this time, like it did last year, but look at my internet receiver It's not supposed to be on the ground!!! The winds were gusting so strongly Wednesday evening that they bent the pole so much it pulled the guy wires out of the ground and toppled over. See that 30 degree bend in the pole? This pole is not going back up. It has to be replaced. Which means my receiver will remain on the ground for awhile. Rumors of a bucket truck coming to my house Saturday have been mooted but it's supposed to rain tomorrow and you can't erect metal poles in the rain. (not that we haven't but this would be people under company insurance doing it so it won't happen) I'm used to the weather playing merry hell with my internet. The ISP has equipment hanging on towers all over the place and sometimes they get hit with freak lightening strikes or power outages or the wind knocks things askew and someone goes out & rep...

I’ve shared this photo of the CD tower before. And my speculation that there are more CDs somewhere. I want this tower to go in this week’s dump run so I pulled all the CDs out of it and sorted through them. I alphabetized them, removed the duplicates, matched loose discs up to empty cases  and in true college form (since most of these were bought when we were in college) I stored them in milk crates I am missing a bunch of CDs. There is only 1 Bon Jovi CD and only 1 Duran Duran CD and that simply is not possible. I owned all their albums up through 1990 or so.  There is no Berlin, no Guns & Roses, no Siouxie & the Banshees, no Rolling Stones. No Rolling Stones!! Possibly I tossed the bulk of my 80’s pop CDs when I burned them to MP3 but I wouldn’t have tossed the Stones, or Bon Jovi. But there is no other tower anywhere in the house or the sheds.  Suddenly this has gotten expensive.  I’m going to have to go buy those albums again. For yo...

I’ve been on Facebook for a couple of years.  I don’t honestly know how long because I hardly ever go out there. I don’t really ‘get’ Facebook or at least I didn’t until a week or so ago. I have a Facebook account because some people I know online had Facebook accounts & everyone was sending one another flair or maybe throwing food at each other, I can’t recall, but I wanted to get in on it. But after I threw a few soba noodles around there didn’t seem to be much point to the place. Everyone else was talking about how they were reconnecting with people from high school & other old friends.  No one I knew was on Facebook. Nobody. I was the only person in my high school class there. There were 2 people from my class on MySpace and I found a few people I think were kids of former classmates, but no one I knew, or used to know in real life, was on Facebook as recently as 4 months ago. Suddenly though there are a bunch of people I used to know on Facebook.  It’s ...

Just a few photos this week. I’ve been playing in Lightroom with effects It snowed briefly this week Mayhem is getting a bit big for the car carts My collection of Vera Bradley For more weekly winners please visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom .

This is one of the random pieces of furniture stuck in a corner in the junk room with stuff piled in front of it.  My best guess is that it has been unopened since mid-2005 That was about the time the VCR died and also when I got my first iPod. These are just some of our VHS tapes. I think I gave most of them away. It’s about half our CD collection. We have another one of these towers somewhere….(i’d assumed it was in the junk room with this one, but apparently not). When I go the iPod I had no real concept of how much space 4GB is, how many songs that actually was, so I only copied off the songs I really liked from the CDs. Now I have a 40GB Zen and can convert the CD tracks to MP3s so my next project (after I get the junk room done) is to burn all this music to my computer. Maybe I’ll let DH tackle that one.

This is an unretouched photo of a 5.25” floppy disk I unearthed while cleaning the junk closet.  It holds 1.2MB of storage. That’s not even enough to store the full sized photo of itself. I think it is blank because there is no label on it. But we’ll never know for sure because no one I know has a drive capable of reading it. I last had a drive capable of reading it in 1996. Yeah, I’ve been hanging on to a possibly blank disc I have no way of reading for almost 13 years. I’m thinking I might start calling the junk closet my “antique closet”. Someday, far in the future my technologically advanced descendants will find it and wonder what secrets I might have left behind on the unreadable mystery disk.  Obviously, not photos.

Sorry about that. I've been reorganizing the 'office' aka junk storage room and it's been a couple years since we've really done any serious cleaning out in that room ACHOO! So it's dusty and I am allergic to dust. Yesterday was Imbolc. The first of the spring/renewal festivals, a celebration of the growing light. But it is also midwinter. We are 6 weeks past the Winter Solstice and have 6 more weeks until the Spring Equinox.  I am very fond of Imbolc because it quite literally means light is starting to return to my life. Due to the positioning of my house, I don’t get much direct sunlight in my windows from Yule to Imbolc. The light hits the windows about 3:45 and starts sliding back by 5. Imbolc means the soon the bricks might get enough sun to hold some warmth & the house won’t be so chilly. It’s also when I get a start on my spring cleaning. Once spring really is showing oustide, I want to be outside cleaning. I need to get the inside stuff do...

Monday was Mayhem’s birthday.  He asked for cupcakes with lots of sprinkles One of his gifts was a pop up book called Encyclopedia Prehistorica All the dinos had to come & see it We finally had some snow I’ve been cleaning out our junk closet & found some ancient technology I also bought some new technology   For more weekly winners please visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom