havocandmayhem.com

Lately, whenever I open the pantry I am greeted by this They’ve been in there for a couple of weeks. Different ones on different days. I think they are on a rota or something. Mayhem reminds me every day that the dinos would like some muffins. Mayhem himself does not like muffins so he isn’t in this for gain. Today was the coolest it has been in weeks, which is not so cool really, more like the difference between 94 degrees and humid and 91 degrees and not quite as humid. So I decided to take pity on the dinosaurs & make them some muffins. I was out of bananas so my standby recipe was out & I went looking for something new.  I found a recipe for peanut butter muffins written on a random scrap of paper in my mom’s old Good Housekeeping Cookbook. I had all the ingredients, so I went with it. But I used some chocolate peanut butter I bought at the Mennonite market.   I don’t know where the tiger came from, but the triceratops is missing. I mixed it all...

Yesterday Havoc came too me and started telling me about how he had cleared this space in his bedroom so he could put his computer there and talk to Rose and Beth on it. pause a moment while I digest that fact that my 6 year old has just informed me he wants to shut himself in his room and talk to girls on the internet… wasn’t I supposed to have a few more years before this happened? I went with the long term issue first. No computers in bedrooms. In our family we watch TV, surf the web & look at porn in the living room, where anyone in the family can walk in and see what you are up to.  Havoc was not happy about this development. Other kids have computers in their rooms. But the weirdness of our house came to my rescue. The wireless router is in the living room, at the opposite corner of the house than Havoc’s bedroom. And there is a 2 foot thick cinderblock wall (for roof support) running down the middle of the house. The wireless signal can’t reach is room. See, it’s...

It’ll be in NYC next year.  That is the right coast, New York City is a mere 7ish hours away by car. Straight up I95, once I get to I95. Driving past at least 3 major metropolitan areas to then have to find my way around a 4th one does not thrill me but could be done.  I find tall buildings very distracting. Nothing for 60 miles in any direction is bigger than 4 stories. In fact you have to go about 30 to find one over 3. At that point you hit strip mall & housing development heaven – which, while densely settled, is not particularly tall.  I can’t help staring at anything over about 8 stories. And the busiest road I am used to driving on is a 4 lane all access divided highway – 2 lanes in each direction, some stoplights and you can turn left at frequent spots. Where I live having three cars in front of you at the stop light or having to wait 7 seconds to turn left in the median is sufficient justification for you to say “My God! The traffic is horrible today!” ...

It was my birthday on Monday. I am 42 now. I bought a new laptop as my gift. And just in time because this happened to the old one as I was finishing transferring things The clones called for a moment of silence in memory of the Compaq DH gave me roses I made a discovery. You know the monster that is hiding under the bed, just waiting to grab your ankles, so you have to jump into & out of bed 3 feet away?(Or am I alone in that?) It’s real! And it’s cute! Please visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom for more Weekly Winners

It’s BlogHer this weekend in Chicago. I’m not there, again. I’m ok with that. If it were less than 3 hours away & I wasn’t there I might be a bit grumpy at whatever circumstances were keeping me away. But I hate to fly & Chicago is way way too far for me to drive all by my lonesome (or worse, with the little demons along) But I am not alone in my non-BlogHerness. There are at least a few hundred of us. Check out Blog Hop ‘09 hosted by Robin at Pensieve for a list that you too can join to visit others experiencing the same lack of BlogHer you are this weekend. If you are visiting me from BlogHop then WELCOME! I am Stacey, aka ComfyMom. I am a just turned 42 year old mother of 2 young boys, known online as Havoc & Mayhem and affectionately (really!) referred to as ‘the little demons’. There are many many dinosaurs in my life. And muffins. I work from home in a sort of text support position currently. I used to be a data analyst for a large call center & ha...

My husband reminded me that it has been almost 20 years since we bought our first computer. It was a Maxar 286 with 1MB of system memory, 1MB video memory and a processor speed of 12.5MHz. It had a tiny hard drive and was a DOS based interface.(photo taken in our apartment in 1991, please note the joystick and all the MtDew, needed to stay awake to play games all night) We wouldn’t get Windows 3.1 until we upgraded to a 386 in 1993 or so. It used these sort of floppies which do not have enough space on them to store this photo of them (photos taken in our junk closet in April 2009, can you say ‘pack rats’?). and these sorts of floppies, which might be able to hold this photo of them We had a dial up connection at a whopping 2400kbps and mostly used local BBS sites, but there was this new thing called Prodigy that connected you with the whole country, but only with others on Prodigy. Our phone line was tied up for hours while I posted to forums and s...

I’m not going. AGAIN. I’ve never been & probably never will unless they host it in  Washington, DC, Baltimore, MD or  Richmond, VA or possibly Philly or Charlotte, NC. Pittsburgh would be good too. I could drop the kids & DH with my folks in Wheeling for the weekend & drive up daily. I’m sad, but at this point I’m used to it. I’ll be following everyone on Twitter.  I hope everyone who is going has a good time!

It’s an ASUS 17” gamer laptop. 6GB RAM, 1GB dedicated graphics memory, 500GB hard drive,HD screen,etc etc. Very nice, very fast, very slick screen. Kinda bright actually. Combined with my beloved 22” flat screen it is almost too tall for me use. And I am not used to having a number pad anymore. Losing it 4 years ago when I switched to a laptop from a desktop was very hard. It took months for me to stop reaching for it.  It will take just as long for me to get used to the delete key not being all the way at the end anymore. I had everything reinstalled by Sunday at noon. Except my email and ACDSee. I expected the ACDSee problem & have pretty much just written it off. I have 4, yes 4! other photo programs that work just fine in Vista. Surely to god one of them can tag things. But the email…oh my precious email… I’ve been running a 10 year old version of Outlook since it came out. It’s not Vista compatible. I could buy Outlook 2007 for $55 from the academic supersto...

The laptop is reaching the end of it’s life. It’s had the buzzing problem for a bit & the new HD failed to help. It over heats. It clicks and groans. It takes forever to load anything. every program freezes at some point. Two days ago it started just shutting down at random, generally when the CPU is running a bit. I’ve found a new one & hopefully tomorrow I will be able to get it. Supposedly it is in stock at a Best Buy an hour away, not the easy to get to one south of us, but the one in traffic hell to the east. It has Vista, with free upgrade to Windows 7. It also has 1Gb of virtual memory (I have 128MB now) and 500GB HD (I have 160 now, recently replacing the 80GB one the laptop came with). It has 6GB of RAM (I have 4). It has a build in webcam. I’ve never used a webcam. I have this vague worry videos of me looking at the screen unaware I’m being filmed will end up on You Tube. I’ll have to reload EVERYTHING.  Just the list of Firefox add ons is daunting, never mi...

I had this conversation with Havoc the other day Havoc: “This boy calls me Dork all the time.” Me: “Well, that is rude of him. Name calling isn’t nice.” Havoc dithers a bit about this. He doesn’t like being called Dork but then he says. “It’s ok I guess. It’s a game we play.” M: “Doesn’t sound like a very nice game to me & it sounds like you don’t like it much.” H: “No, it was his idea. He called me Dork & then said I could call him a name too.” M: “Oh really?” H: “yeah, he calls me Dork and I call him Pussy” pause for a couple of seconds while I CALMLY digest that. M: “what do you call him?” H: “Pussy” M: “How did you come up with that name?” H: “This older boy said it would be a good one” Do you know where these boys were when this game was being played? Vacation bible school. I have no idea who the older boy was, another student or a helper. I have no idea where any authority figure was either. I swear fairly often. I am 100% responsible for any ‘...

I’m getting caught up from last weekend We had a pool party for July 4th These guys joined in This one was pushing everyone   Fortunately there were plenty of floaties   Dino paddling   We had fireworks,and I am just no good at shooting them or processing them   There were macro moments as well   For more Weekly Winners please visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom

We live somewhat near Luray Caverns. There is a huge mountain between us and the caverns and a decent amount of flat & foothills, but it does qualify for spur of the moment trip status. sidenote – when I lived in the suburbs, the first 25 or so years of my life, anything 30 miles or more away was a day trip. It was just too far to go without advanced planning. Now that I live rural and just buying milk is a 20 mile drive, anything under 120 miles is considered ‘nearby’ I enjoy Luray Caverns. They have an interesting history, are a nice ambient indoor temperature, involve just enough walking to feel you have earned an ice cream at the end and are a good ‘nearby’ place to take visitors when the weather goes all rainy on a holiday weekend (apparently everyone in a 100 mile radius agrees with this because the parking lot was packed, mostly with Virginia plates with nearby county stickers on them). We’ve been there 3-4 times in the 15 years we have lived in the area. I went once w...

We had a 4th of July party complete with fireworks. A bunch of friends came over. There were 7 kids 7 and under running around, getting in and out of the pool and splashing water all over the food.  There were 8 adults sitting around, shouting not to splash or squirt water in this direction. note to self – move deck back a couple feet next spring There were hot dogs, hamburgers, assorted dips, lots of chips, a fruit platter, a bowl of fruit salad and a lemon pound cake. Then the whining for the fire works began, a full hour and a half before dark. We don’t do sparklers because most of the moms are afraid of letting the kids have them. The one mom who isn’t (me) admits to setting herself on fire with sparklers 15 years ago & so can’t argue with the danger. (but I would totally let the boys have them if it wouldn’t set off 5 other kids wailing to have them too. I was sitting down in a crowd, in a long skirt, after several beers, when my skirt caught fire. Not a situation th...

Some of my 365 photos.  The fireworks were very late last night, so they will be in next week’s batch. Mayhem did a lot of work on his puter Havoc practiced swimming underwater The knights took the pirate ship This is Smoke And her brother Thor   In macro news the army men have reached my keyboard For more Weekly Winners please visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom

I signed up for the MckLinky monthly blog hop and then being my usual forgetful self, failed to put up a post about it. The theme this month is introductions. My failure to post about it probably says more than I can in words. My name is Stacey. I am a nearly 42 year old, married, SAHM of 2 boys, Havoc age 6 and Mayhem age 5. I used to be a data analyst and am still a data geek.  I do various work from home gigs now. I read a great deal, mostly historic mysteries. I like to crochet and digi scrap. I take tons of photos for my 365 project. Dinosaurs & Star Wars fill my days.  I look forward to meeting some new people & visiting your great blogs.  If you add your link here, it will appear on all participating blogs at the same time.