havocandmayhem.com

I am a thesis short of a Master’s Degree in medieval history (or as they now classify the Tudor age – Early Modern History, (which makes the fact slightly less interesting in a current context but still interesting from a personal historic point of view) ) None of that is the fun fact The fun fact is that despite my spending the past 20 years reading & writing about medieval history and how I study medieval history, I still cannot spell ‘medieval’ without a spell check. Medieval…medeival, meadevil, medieveal. I had one teacher who insisted the biggest problem students of the Tudor era had was the spelling of Britain & insisted we write it over and over again that first day so we’d get it right. Not Britian, but Britain. I never understood that because, Hello? Britain did not exist as a concept in Tudor times. You were English, or Welsh or the enemy up in Scotland. Medieval though was still very much a part of Tudor history (not that they used the word themselves, but

DH & a co-worker, T, went at looked at cars Friday. T is in the market for a new car. He gets a new one every 2-3 years. He said he thinks that after putting 50,000 miles on a car it is time to trade it in. T asked DH what our number was for getting a new car. DH told T he was driving a 14 year old truck with 250,000 miles on it and my car is a 2001 with 140,000 miles on it. Generally we figure 3 years after paying the car off is a good time to consider getting a new one, assuming it is having mechanical problems. If it’s running fine there is no need to replace it. We passed the 3 year paid off mark 3 years ago on my car and it’s not running well right now. DH was sparked by this conversation so we decided to look at cars Saturday after dinner (to better avoid car salesmen). The plan was to drive around the 3 used car lots in town and see what was on offer in our price range to give me a feel for what is out there so that Monday I could stop by alone & check them out (alon

This is the time of year when my car takes its annual week long rest cure at the mechanic, costing me between $1000-1800. Last year most of the engine needed replaced (except the transmission and a/c) & between repairs and rental,it was $1800.  The year before that had been the collision so the insurance picked up most of it but I still had a $500 deductible and even though the insurance was paying for a rental car, I still popped for the added insurance on it, which came to another $500 by the time I got my car back. My collision had happened due to high winds blowing a tree branch into the road & my hitting it. It was still quite windy when I rented the car or I would have passed. The transmission was replaced in 2006 for $1100. Currently I have no a/c, which I didn’t have last year and somehow survived but was miserable, and the car makes ominous groaning noises from time to time in certain situations, like it’s shocks or suspension need oiled or replaced. I’m spec

It’s just the daily photos this week. Apartment buildings near the airport. The tallest building in our town is only 4 storeys. Buildings are HUGE in the metropolis. Overzealous yeast in a batch of bread dough DH took a corner too wide on his bike. Fortunately he was only doing about 15MPH and there was a bed of mulch where he landed I have a new job Reading to Daddy My to be read stack is getting sort of low To see more weekly winners please visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom ! Thanks!   

Mayhem had his second tooth filled today. It went really well apparently. DH goes with him to the chair. I have issues & don’t want to expose the boys to my mental dental hang ups. So I only get second hand info on how it went. He wasn’t very happy about the shot, but who is really? And it was his 3rd shot in 2 days, which would be making me fairly unhappy if it were me. he had a physical on Tuesday and needed 2 vaxes. But all the shots are done. All the doc & dental visits are done for at least 6 months, short of sudden ear infections. A doc & dentist free summer is something to look forward to.

Not as I would ever do personally. My recent vacation involved flying out of Reagan National airport.  Reagan National is a reasonable enough distance from my house but I never think of it when making flight plans. I immediately jump to BWI or Dulles. Reagan National isn’t even on my radar. In fact, I think about it so little, in my mind it is still simply National airport. The last time I flew out of it was early Sept 2001 and the time before that was about 4 years before that.  But I’ve been in and out of BWI and Dulles many times (and almost always at come gawdawful hour of the morning) Here’s the one thing about National everyone knows - it’s on the Metro line. “Oh it’s so convenient!” everyone says when you say you are flying out of National. “it’s on the Metro” “You can just hop on the Metro for that” “Oh yeah, you don’t have to deal with parking. You can just get on the Metro” Then I say “Oh, have you taken the Metro to National then? Where do I change lines? how long do

We’ve been on vacation this week. We flew to Florida. to visit my parents who have interesting landscaping Naturally we did not travel alone. They played hide & seek My mom made her super special secret spaghetti sauce. Shhh! Don’t tell anyone. We also went to Build a Bear, though no one got a bear. Havoc chose a monkey And naturally Mayhem went with this guy For more Weekly Winners please visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom . Thanks!    

One of the prompts today at Mama Kat's site is “what would you do if I sent you $400 today” I’d buy upgrades to first class for the flight home. That would be $300 plus tax and I’d send the rest off to Mama Kat. The airline hadn’t assigned seats when I made the reservations.  Oh, it *looked* like they had but it turns out those seats I reserved can’t be reserved online, they have to be reserved at the gate or maybe by phone of the 16th. Why? Is it some sort of crowd control or some sort of power trip? I had 3 seats together in row 6 reserved but no, actually I only have 1 and the boys have no seats. So I called today and they said “well row 4 is open but they can only assign that at the gate. We’ll put you in the last row, which is also open & we can assign." Have I mentioned I am claustrophobic? I’m not wild about flying because of fear of crashing but also because all these people on this plane are sucking all the oxygen out of the air and I am going to die if I

It’s 8:30am and I’m sitting at my computer eating Cheerios and drinking coffee. The main difference is there is a pool and it’s about 80 degrees already. At home it would only be about 50 and no pool. We got to the airport about 2 hours before the flight left, because you never know with traffic and security and the general airportiness just how long things will take. For the record they have ALWAYS taken considerably less time than we plan for but you and I both know that as soon as I decide to leave an hour later than usual there will be a massive construction slow down on the interstate and 2 of the security scanning machines will break resulting in a 45 minute wait there. We passed the time rather well. The boys entertained themselves and were not disruptive to others. They did ask when were we getting on the plane rather frequently but that is to be expected. They let us board at last & they waited patiently for the time they could watch a movie on the laptop. They were

I was playing some more with my macro lens. Plastic army men make good macro subjects So do brownies.  Just look at the chocolaty cheesecakey goodness I took some standard close ups also This is Smoke, the kitten of the litter we are keeping The boys have been into the Wii Fit latley These guys have been feeling neglected, so they took the wiimote hostage They were eventually bought off with taquitos and the new Lego catalog For more Weekly Winners please check out Lotus at Sarcastic Mom .

It’s hell on packing. I end up dragging a bunch of stuff I never use a thousand miles down the length of the country because I think I will have time to do things. Things like organize and tag 6 years worth of photographs or 28GB of kits (which I now have to redo since ACDSee apparently needs more than 2 days copy them to a new drive). Which means packing my EHD. It’s a WD passport so it doesn't take up much room. Things like work on the shawl I am crocheting. Which means packing the 1000 yard ball of yarn, the hooks, the stitch markers, and gods help me – the scissors. Do I even have TSA approved scissors? Will I need them on the plane or I can I just wait & use my mom’s? Things like read. Which means deciding which books to take and how many of them because I’d rather have too many books than too few. My parents library is mostly political thrillers and I don’t enjoy them & so I’d have NOTHING TO READ which makes me a bit panicky at the very thought. So that’s lik

Mayhem has been trash talking the Lego Star Wars game a lot lately “I’m too good to stop. Watch me smash you” “I’m the Jedi master. I master Jedi. You’re nothing storm troopers” “I’m gonna power force you back to nowhere” “You can’t catch me, I am made of awesome.” My favorite of his little sayings is something he started recently. He comes up to me and says “Look out mama! There is a hug behind you” Which is possibly the most adorable thing ever to date. ==================== In other news I am trying to copy my 120GB WD passport contents over to my new 320GB WD Passport drive. BUT! The Passports both insist on being connected directly to the laptop, not to a USB hub. BUT! That doesn’t matter because the laptop absolutely cannot cope with having 2 WD Passports connected at once. It’s willing to see both of them but not copy between them. SO! I have to use my ancient back up EHD, which is the hard drive from my old desktop, now in a case to convert it to an EHD.

Today I went through the outlying bookshelves – the ones in the bedroom and bathrooms – and purged them. Then I did some final rearrangements of the books and shelved the new books. I now have the equivalent of about two and half shelves of open space and shelves that were packed 2 deep are now single packed for the most part, allowing for some grouping issues (I have all the Agatha Christies piled on top of one another on one shelf for instance and all the books relating to Tudor England are crammed into another shelf as well).  I’m now going through the LibraryThing booklist & matching up books. I now see I should shelve things in an alphabetical rather than an aesthetically pleasing manner. It makes tracking them easier These are the final purge totals. (I found a stash of books from the last purge on the bottom shelf of a bookcase blocked by my sewing machine cart) History 59 Esoteric 38 Fantasy 6

We had some beautiful weather this week so I was able to get out and photograph spring The crabapple tree The forsythia bush drooping after the rain A Bradford pear tree I forget which fruit tree this one was. We have a lot of fruit trees. I decided the kittens were big enough to handle & took some photos for scale “Oh nos! The triceratops is bigger than me” “Don’t you roar at me buster!” Havoc after helping take the cap off the truck oh, and a bought a macro lens this week “I’m ready for my close up”   For more Weekly Winners please visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom

The romance books are on the shelves in the far corner from the door, behind the pile of random boxes and collapsible chairs. They are the last group bunched together on the shelves and the second to last group I have to purge. After this is just general fiction and general fiction is scattered all over the place. Romance is a denial category for me. For some reason I always think I have fewer romance novels than I do. I had every intention of claiming this subject had suffered heavily in the previous purge, along with fantasy & science fiction. But the numbers just don’t bear that out. There are 197 books tagged with ‘romance’ in my Library Thing library. 189 are on the booklist. I stopped keeping up the booklist in 2005, so I have only read 8 new romance novels in about 4 years. That probably accounts for why I think I have so few. Romance novels are just a drop in the book bucket. I counted the romance books on my shelves. There are 153. minus the 8 new ones….145 subtrac

Last night I packed up our clothes for our week in Florida. We are not leaving until April 12th but since I am privileged (ahem) to be flying on an airline that charges you $25 to check your bag if you don’t belong to their special club, I am shipping my bag down by UPS. I had to balance the need to pack 2 weeks before we actually leave against having to deal with the airline check in procedure. This was no contest. I did have to buy new bottles of shampoo, toothpaste, hair gel, etc and pack them in the box because of the TSA carry on regulations, but it’s not like I won’t use the stuff and it doesn’t expire. I even managed to get one of my firm full pillows in the box. (My folks have pillows that are either super flat or feather stuffed and I’m allergic to those so I bring my own) This leaves me just needing to pack medicines, make up and electronics into my carry on, plus whatever toys the boys want to take and a couple of books. And it was only $17 to ship the box. And I

My largest genre by far.  There are 592 books tagged ‘mystery’ in my Library Thing library. The next closest number is ‘history’ with 246. According to my booklist, I had 398 mystery books in my house prior to my last purge. I got rid of about half of them, but because it is my favorite genre I’ve probably added about a third of that number back. Giving me roughly 260 mystery novels currently. I read historic mysteries, my favorite settings being until recently, the medieval/Tudor era and the early Roman Empire. Lately the 1920’s have been growing on me, with 12 of the 15 books I recently purchased being set in that era (the Daisy Dalrymple series and the Phryne Fisher series). I approached these shelves with some dread because the vast majority of these books are old friends. All the Agatha Christies, gathered from used bookstores around Morgantown while I was in college. I remember packing them up every May (more of them every year) and carting them to yet another apartment, find