havocandmayhem.com

forgive me if there ends up being 4 copies of this post. Windows Live Writer is being odd this morning I’ve mentioned the booklist a few times but I have never really explained it. The booklist, in it’s current incarnation is an Excel spreadsheet that lists every book I owned over a roughly 20 year period. It start in 1985 as a list in a notebook of all the books in my possession, after I bought some duplicates at a used bookstore because the cover art was different. It was handwritten, eventually rewritten into a loose leaf binder alphabetically. I entered it all into whatever the DOS based spreadsheet program was on the 286 DH bought in 1991 and it eventually evolved into an Excel spreadsheet with categories and subcategories and could be sorted by author or date or topic etc. It even spent a brief period as an Access database, but not successfully, so it went back to Excel. It was handy to have a spreadsheet to use when I was learning to do different things in Excel so it ended up w...

I have a mixed bag of photos this week. The rainy weather is keeping me in the house still First we have the kittens at almost 2 weeks old. Mayhem had a dentist appointment (He brought a friend with him)   We had spaghetti for dinner one night You can’t keep the baby dinos out of spaghetti, they love it so much. Havoc’s weekly winner For even more weekly winners check out Lotus at Sarcastic Mom every Sunday

Sitting cozily next to the 2 shelves of fantasy (and overflowing on to them) are the science fiction books (not including the works of Douglas Adams, which are in a special category all their own – Holy and UnPurgeable). The scifi books were the victims of the hard core purge a few years ago. There were 183 then and only about 60 some books remain. I have 159 books tagged with sci fi in Library Thing, which makes me wonder what 20 or so books I have mis-tagged, either in the booklist or Library Thing. Possibly the Thomas Covenant series,… pause while I consider matching up 183 books in Library Thing…no, not today. I haven’t picked up one of these books since that purge. But I can’t quite let go of them. They are the products of my happy, prosperous, child free days in the late 90’s, when I was making lots of money in the phone business and chatting on Doctor Who email lists. I can’t give these books up! I know some of the authors! well…’know them’ in the way you ‘know’ people w...

This isn’t about books this time. Yesterday I was feeling the beginning of a stomach virus coming on, the one that half my family has had in the past week. So I was laying in bed, idly browsing the web. I realized I had to log in everywhere I went, which is unusual. If I closed Firefox and reopened it, I had to relog in everywhere again. My first thought was VIRUS so I ran Malwarebytes and searched the web. While cleaning up what I thought was the problem all my Firefox user data was deleted.  All of it – bookmarks, history, logins & passwords, add ons. GONE. Not even system restore could bring it back. So now I am rebuilding it all. I’m trying to be positive about this. There were an unworkable number of bookmarks, I had disabled several of the add ons. Everything that I used, I will miss and will find again, resulting in an easier to navigate set of bookmarks & less clutter. Nothing is gone forever from the interwebs Right??? Seriously, I want to cry. But it...

  The itty bitty kittys are moving around a lot more

I was going to do a book related tribute because it’s all things books here until the purge is done, but I was sidetracked this morning by a couple of dental appointments. Today was Mayhem’s first cleaning. He and Havoc had simultaneous appointments and DH came along so each boy would have some company. Mayhem’s major concern about everything these days is “How long is this going to take?” said in an impatient tone. Anything that takes longer than about 10 seconds is too long. And forget opening his mouth for anyone, to do anything but complain things are taking too long. The hygienist was great though. She went through all the different tools she used, demonstrated them on his clenched closed teeth and gently coaxed him to open his mouth. Over and over and over again. Every time she stopped doing something the teeth snapped shut and a whine about ‘how much longer’ escaped the barely open lips. Repeat.  Three times. I would have been issuing threats about Star Wars ga...

I’ve mentioned the booklist a few times but I have never really explained it. The booklist, in it’s current incarnation is an Excel spreadsheet that lists every book I owned over a roughly 20 year period. It start in 1985 as a list in a notebook of all the books in my possession, after I bought some duplicates at a used bookstore because the cover art was different. It was handwritten, eventually rewritten into a loose leaf binder alphabetically. I entered it all into whatever the DOS based spreadsheet program was on the 286 DH bought in 1991 and it eventually evolved into an Excel spreadsheet with categories and subcategories and could be sorted by author or date or topic etc. It even spent a brief period as an Access database, but not successfully, so it went back to Excel. It was handy to have a spreadsheet to use when I was learning to do different things in Excel so it ended up with a lot of information I didn’t exactly need or originally intend to track. I can tell you how many...

I decided to start with my smallest fiction subject. I used to be a huge fantasy fan. If dragons and/or wizards were in a book, I bought it. I had dozens and dozens of fantasy books, almost 200 according to the booklist, actually. 219 books are tagged ‘fantasy’ in my Library Thing library, which includes library books. It is my 3rd most used tag. But gradually my interests shifted more toward historic fiction and mystery. Plus with so many people writing stories in settings like Krynn, the quality got uneven and Raymond Feist became so prolific I couldn’t keep up.  When the time came to purge a few years ago, most of the fantasy books were shipped out.  I kept my favorites. The original Dragonlance saga books, the Rose of the Prophet series, the first 4 of the Riftwar series and everything by David Eddings. There really aren’t that many books. If the Eddings books were not almost all hardbacks they would only fill one shelf. hhmmm…the Eddings books… stares at book t...

This week’s photos are all Project 365 photos. It’s been grey, rainy and cold and we’ve all mostly been hibernating, so I haven’t had the camera out much. I’ve been purging my bookshelves. Guess what my area of study was in grad school? It was time for a new bra. But what size? A misty morning 99 cent kid meal night at Buffalo Wild Wings is a family favorite Our not so stray cat, Tux, had a litter of kittens (free! to a good home! in about 6 weeks) 1000 yards of a cotton/silk/wool blend. Someday it will be a shawl. Right now I am still trying to roll it into a ball. Havoc made Grandma a monkey for her birthday next month. For even more weekly winners check out Lotus at Sarcastic Mom every Sunday

I am still working on the non fiction part of my bookcases. I have moved on to the esoteric case – books on spirituality, the goddess, Wicca, druids, philosophy, tarot, Arthuriana and child rearing. Some of my goddess spirituality books Some of my tarot books Does a woman who had not really read the cards in 7 years actually *need* 36 books about tarot? That’s not counting the books that come with the decks. I have 77 tarot decks (I was a collector in my child free days), at least 30 came with substantial sized books. Do I really need 77 tarot decks? No. No I don’t, but that is a purge for another day.  I also don’t need quite so many goddess books. I’ve been walking this path for almost 16 years now. I am beyond the ‘gather every book you can find on the broadly defined topic’ stage and my interest has drifted from the Celtic focus. Working with ruthless determination & speed I kept maybe 10 of those books and about that many tarot ones. I wish I could show you...

I decided to start with the non-fiction books reasoning that: A. I am more of a fiction fan so they might be marginally easier for me to purge in a calm & rational manner B. They are what is the first two bookcases of the office and are more likely to be grouped together in other bookshelves. Mostly B was the driving force because I am attached to all these books & can rationalize keeping every last one of them. I approached the first bookshelf and tried to be detached about it’s contents – history. Oh but I *love* history. Especially Tudor era history which is the bulk of the books, and the history of women from ancient to Tudor times, which is most of the rest of the books, and London, which is the rest of the rest of the books. So I can’t get rid of ANY of them. ….stares at the shelves for a bit, fingering the titles fondly… Ok, maybe I do not need 5 autobiographies of Elizabeth I, maybe just my 2 favorites and I never really liked Mary, Queen of Scots so we ca...

I haven’t done much advanced menu planning lately because I have 30lbs of boneless skinless chicken breast, 22lbs of ground beef and I am not sure how many cheap cuts of beef in my freezer (lots! they had London Broil on sale for $1.99 a pound back in January). So I have more or less known what was for dinner – chicken or beef & have been falling back on tacos, meatloaf, broiled beef, rolled stuffed chicken and chicken nuggets with random breading, and the occasional frittata (18 egg set, BOGO!).  But it’s gotten a tad boring. So yesterday I dug out my recipe cards and we will be having Thai inspired noodles with beef & veggies Cider vinegar braised chicken & potatoes Chipoltle chicken rolls with avocado dipping sauce BBQ chicken pizza and the usual suspects Tacos Mini meat loaves (which later become) spaghetti with meat balls Goldfish breaded chicken strips Scotch eggs & salad Soup and sandwiches Plus we have a parent teacher conference duri...

This week is mostly nature shots but first we once again started the week off with baking. Daddy made cookies, with help Please note that cookies do not attract dinos. They attract crocodiles & race cars (I’m not sure what the horseradish sauce is doing out. They were chocolate chip cookies) It was beautiful for a couple of days so I decided to get some photos of spring. Budding trees. A lone flower blooming Tiny pinecones growing Havoc took some photos as well. One of his weekly winners We also took photos of the local wildlife. This is Nefertiti. This is Tux. This is Ghost. And of course, these guys. (Havoc’s photo) Then it snowed Please visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom to see some more Weekly Winners!

Not too long ago I mention putting purple streaks in my hair. I did eventually go buy a highlight cap and proceeded to dye my hair. Twice. The second time I made a point of pulling big clumps of hair through those holes. You can kinda see the purple. If you are outside, in daylight and know what too look for, or if I am standing up close to a mirror in my bathroom under the lamp I can see a few purple hairs. But it is not photographable. Problem is, my hair is medium brown. Noticeable color will require bleaching first and nothing on this earth will persuade me to bleach even a few dozen hairs.  I think if I went with the foil and bigger chunks of hair I might get a more noticeable result without bleaching. But that requires DH’s help, which means after 8:30pm and the stuff has to stay on 40 minutes so it’ll be after 9:30 before I can rinse it out and I go to bed at 10. I don’t like washing my hair in the evening.  Especially right before bed.  even if I blow it ...

I ordered 11 books off of half.com last week. I got them for a total of about $60 including shipping. That is probably the most I have spent in a single time on books in over a year. It is certainly the most books I have purchased at once in well over two years. They are either books I have heard on audio & want to read again or books I have checked out of the library often enough I decided to just buy them. So they have started arriving the past few days and I went to put a few of them on my bookshelves. This proved more of a challenge that I expected. A couple or so years ago I got rid of ALOT of books. HUNDREDS of books actually. Boxes and boxes of books went out of this house. About a hundred or so were listed on half.com or bookmooch.com.  So many books left my house that, despite the evidence of my own eyes, I firmly believed I had gotten rid of most of my books and all I needed to do was reorganize what was left & there would be all this space on my bookshelves. ...

We live in a poor rural county. Studies show that your poor rural areas, or maybe just poor areas in general, are less likely to have books in the home and less likely to encourage reading in children. Schools obviously want to combat this, especially at the preschool & kindergarten level. The kids bring a book home from the school library every day, this month is 2 at a time for a special reading program, and are often given books by the local Literacy Council, the PTO and Scholastic Books(the schools earn points to get books to give away or keep in their library). Mayhem has been given 5 since the beginning of the year. He’s being given another one today (Goldilocks) This is where the guilt comes in. Mayhem doesn’t need those books. In that same space of time the boys have checked out 17 books from the county library, in addition to the 4-5 a week from the school library and I have bought/traded for 8 more. The boys have 6 shelves stuffed with their books in the house, plus...

I tried to do some grocery shopping yesterday at Target but failed when the bulk of my available time was sucked up in a search for tablecloths, placemats & napkins. We swapped out the smaller trestle table that came with our breakfast nook, for the kitchen table we inherited from DH’s mom. The kids are now using full sized plates & silverware & that is taking up the space where we used to put food & condiments. The kitchen table is a 35 year old low budget,extendable table with 2 drop leaves. If I had the space, I could seat 14 at that table, but some of them would have to be outside because the kitchen just isn’t that big. In fact, with just one leaf up it is impossible to get to the seats against the wall without climbing over the side bench & once you are there you are trapped for the duration of the meal. So we put Mayhem on that side. Anyway, because it is a low budget 35 year old table it is full of scrapes & burn marks that can’t be sanded off, becau...

The week started off with muffins being made Naturally this attracted our local wildlife I’ve often wondered about the dinos affinity for muffins. Apparently they insist on being given them “I can’t turn them down Mom” We went to Buffalo Wild Wings for kids’ night They seated us under a TV Mayhem had show & tell at preschool This guy insisted on coming along as well and I made a camera strap & snuggie for my D40 yesterday For more Weekly Winners visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom