havocandmayhem.com

  Painting time Another outing on the hill   Endless parade of allergy meds Dis mah hoomin Please visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom for more Weekly Winners. Thanks for stopping by!

My downfall is my diet. I can exercise, that is not a problem. Treadmills, cycles, weights, I can do them. Step aerobics not so much, but as long as it doesn’t involve fancy foot work (step up kick, step back kick, grapevine, now from the left step kick, etc) or sleeping in a tent at the end of the day, I can do the exercise portion of ‘diet & exercise’ What I can’t do is control my eating. It’s not that I indiscriminately gorge myself every time I sit down. I’m actually pretty good about portion size at meals & snacks with 95% of my food. But that remaining 5% is an issue & accounts for most of my weight gain or lack of loss. Some people have a problem with chips or with cookies or with soda. I have a problem with a random ever changing variety of savory foods. My problem food of choice varies; I fixate on something for a bit, come to terms with it, let it go, do great for a few weeks, then fixate on a new food & repeat. I never know what is going to strike, so I ...

I have a rather large stack of books on my nightstand, the photo of which I can’t find right now and the camera battery is currently charging, so let me just say it is currently 12 books tall and doesn’t include the 3 I read over the weekend. The book that gets the most attention though is Mayhem’s newest favorite book He was smitten the moment he laid eyes on it. “Are you gonna make vees fings for me Mama? All of dem?” Then he went through the book and told me what he wanted made first, then second, then third, while Havoc shouted from behind me “I want the Ninja! Will you make me the ninja?” over and over. I love the little guys in this book! they are so fun to make. Naturally I went with the Monty Python jokes first Honey it’s a little man from the village   He’s come about the reaping!   None shall pass! Come back you cowards! I’ll bite your kneecaps off!   How do you know she’s a witch   She looks like one! (the last one i...

I’ve developed an odd habit lately that I find a bit disturbing. I find myself thinking, whenever I meet a girl in Havoc’s class, “Is this my potential daughter in law?” And I have no idea where this is coming from. What buried part of my psyche is trying to match up my first grader with a wife already? Why am I wondering this? Is it normal? Partly I suspect it is the local culture getting to me. Around here there is a high likelihood you will marry your high school sweetheart or at the very least end up marrying someone you have known since kindergarten. So there is a decent possibility that the girl he shares reading class with or the girl in tae kwon do or the girl who joins the Star Wars battles on the playground will someday be the woman who complains to her friends about how her MIL never volunteers to babysit, oh she’s willing enough when asked but you’d think she volunteer to see her grandkids and then she lets the kids run all over the place so maybe it is for the best a...

  Some of this weeks photos Homemade granola bars – chewy but crumbly Downhill bike riding Morning mist For more weekly winners please visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom Thanks for stopping by!

That does not mean I am sitting here naked from the waist down.  I can find my shorts and those couple of pairs of capris I have been wearing all summer. What I cannot find are my pants pants. The ones with the hems that reach the ground. I know I have a half a dozen pairs of jeans. I can find one. I know I have at least 4 pairs of regular pants, I can’t find any. I put them all away in June, along with the long sleeved and 3/4 sleeved stuff I hadn’t packed up already. To the best of my knowledge everything went into the storage bags the summer clothes came out of & the storage bags went under the bed or up on the closet shelf.  But the pants are not there. The shirts are, along with the”‘if I don’t like/need this enough to get it out of the storage bag over the summer I am taking it to Goodwill” clothing. But there are no pants to be found. I looked in all the likely other places, but while likely, they were not places I actually put pants. It isn’t quite cool...

We’re getting our satellite tv service upgraded & they need to send a tech out. The customer service rep was trying to get info to help the tech find the place. This is especially important since google maps and mapquest can’t seem to find my house but will take you a place a mile up the road via 2 dirt roads, which are unnecessary since there is a perfectly good paved road leading there (and here for that matter). CS: what are the cross streets? Me: ummmm…this is an 8 mile long road that changes names twice and doesn’t actually cross with any paved road while it is called by my street name. Here are some bigger roads (aka, they are trafficed enough to have yellow lines on them) that are in the vicinity. And these are the names of the roads you need to take to get here from there even though they are actually one road. Maybe you should have the tech call me, it’s different depending on whether he is coming from the north or south. CS: what color is your house Me: ummm..gras...

Now 50% blightier! We’ve gone from this pole to this mini tower   You may be wondering why we would chose to upgrade our eyesore. Well, you remember this bend from February? And this even bendier from June? Quite predictably unexpectedly this happened a few weeks ago No amount of guide wire tightening is going to fix that. Sadly my internet signal is not a matching 50% speedier, but it has improved. WooHoo! What’s a little blight if it gets you faster load times? Here are some photos for scale.  This is my neighbor across the street (and down the hill and back up the hill on the driveway from hell) I’m standing on the road taking this. Their house is for sale. It went on the market last week. $600,000! with 20 acres and a 4 bedroom cabin boasting INCREDIBLE MOUNTAIN VIEWS (just like that in all caps on the website).  Here is an incredible mountain view photo taken from the deck of the house The little white building is our two story b...

Some of this weeks photos I’m still crocheting Morning routine The dinos come to tepppan yaki For more weekly winners please visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom

This  handsome young man is my great grandfather William Wetzel. He was born in 1881 and died a few months before I was born in 1967. This photo was taken in approx 1902-05. William married  Anna Klotz, whose scans I have already posted, around 1905. They had  four children. He was a printer by trade and operated his own shop in Elm Grove for many years and then worked for other printing firms in the area.

These are not adjectives that can be applied to my blog. Or even to me in general. I’m just not that sort of person. I enjoy a lively discussion with opposing opinions or a good debate on issues. I hold firm opinions on hot topics, but while they are firm I can still see the other side has good and valid points. And right there I lose all ability to take a strong stance on anything because I get what you are saying. I don’t agree with it or I find some other aspect of it more compelling, but I do see why you think that. I have friends who have Very Strong Opinions Indeed about things like abortion, health care, war, food quality, homeschooling, term limits and Wal mart (on both sides of the issues). Listening to them is sort of like listening to a revivalist preacher only they have been Saved By Organics or Wal Mart as the case may be. They are fired up with zeal for the War on Terrorism or for legalizing gay marriage. It’s deep and intense and an almost holy light glows on the...

You may recall about a month ago we woke up to 3 young kittens on our porch Sadly misfortune has visited two of them. One we know was attacked. The other we just haven’t seen for 48 hours and since Mama Tux and the remaining kitten have been on the porch for 24 of those, I fear we must assume the worst. When there were 3 kittens I had assumed we’d be taking them to the shelter. Kittens seem to get snapped up at our shelter so I don’t feel bad doing it. I’d try to find homes but given I had no luck 6 months ago, I didn’t have much hope. Then there were 2 kittens,nearly identical and I thought I might be able to find one person to take both. It might take me a little longer but bunco was in a couple weeks and surely 1 of 11 women would know someone who wanted kittens. Then yesterday I realized there was just one kitten. We currently have six felines as permanent residents here 16 year old  Old Lady Cat Pandora 12 year old  Nearly Old Lady Cat Nefertiti Mama ...

All folded up and waiting for storage . See you again in May swimming pool.

Just a few this week Morning dew First leaf of fall Our internet tower by moonlight    For more wonderful Weekly Winners please check out Lotus at Sarcastic Mom

This is Sister Mary Caroline, born Rose Wetzel. She is my great great grandfather’s older sister. She joined the Order of St Francis in 1890. This photo was taken about 10 years later.  I don’t know anything else about her. 

Mayhem is a budding lawyer. He feels the need to argue his case all the time. Since his command of the English language is still a bit limited he falls back on repetition “I’m not going to do it. No No No no No No. I’m not going to do it.” or “I’ll only do it if you do this. You have to do this first. I’m not going to do it if  you don’t do this  first.” We are talking about things like wearing shoes in the grocery store, sitting down to dinner, picking up his toys, saying please & thank you, going to your room when a time out is called and going to bed I have been making the mistake the past 6 months of viewing these statements as part of a dialogue.  I’ll repeat the request, acknowledge his reluctance, try persuasion and worst of all, I will ask him why he doesn’t want to do the thing. This opens whole tangents of protests hitherto unimagined. These episodes almost always end in both of us shouting and him being sent to his room, while I stand over him ste...

It has taken me more than a month to get around to setting up my music playlists on my new computer. It has taken me in fact til Tuesday, (a band I have several tracks by). I had backed up my music folder from the dying laptop when it initially began dying back in June. Then, just to be sure, I backed it up again in July when I bought my Asus. I took the time then to do a little cleaning & reorganizing of my music. There were still things in an iTunes folder and I haven’t had iTunes in 3 years. I have a Creative Zen & use their organizer which doesn’t force itself on you quite the way iTunes does. There  were also some duplicate tracks for things I had ripped from CD in 2005, forgot about & re-ripped in 2008 and a myriad of unnecessary subfolders. I cleaned all that mess up, straightened out the folders and backed it all up again. I copied it all to my new laptop and got involved in retagging my scrap supplies and downloading things to view .nef photos and other thi...

I bought myself 10 personal trainer sessions for my birthday. At the end of them I had lost 6lbs and an inch at my waist. I had gained inches elsewhere which are muscle.  I have toned & firmed up a good deal. I plan on continuing to visit the gym 3 days a week and do the 30 Day Shred at home at least 1-2 days as well. My big need is to lose weight and exercise is not going to do that at this point. I need to eat less. So my focus for this month is on my diet, cutting back portions and swapping fatty snacks for fruits & veggies. So far I could be doing better. It is Wednesday & it will be my first trip to the gym this week. I had cookies for lunch yesterday and Monday’s lunch was brie with grapes. At least there were grapes. But I did a quick sweep of  the house & am now lacking my usual stock of fatty foods minus the cookies (DH makes cookies) but I’ve already eaten the slightly burnt ones & I don’t care as much for the ‘properly’ cooked ones so I s...