havocandmayhem.com

  Mayhem turned 6 this week More Clone troopers joined our household as a result   The dinos don’t mine the Clones But they do not like the droids at all   Unless they are Legos & let them shoot their guns For more Weekly Winners please visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom . Thanks for stopping by!

I’ve been meaning to post about this & keep forgetting.  I received my 2009 Year in Photos book from Blurb a couple weeks ago, which was super fast printing & shipping. It arrived much sooner than I expected. (Lets just get this out of the way. I get nothing at all from Blurb for this post. I just like them. I’d accept something if they wanted to give it to me. The books are not cheap) My 2009 book The first thing I noticed about it was that it was small. It 7x7 and probably I should have had some concept of that size but I am spatially impaired. I cannot visualize size at all. If I am shopping for purses or camera bags online I have to go get purses I already own and a ruler and then assemble them into some configuration that matches the new purse size before I can grasp how big or how small the new purse will be. I have had layout books printed in 8.5x8.5 before and just thought “oh that’s 1.5 inches smaller” But I have no real idea how big 1.5 inches is, nor did ...

My 9lb 2oz newborn is a strapping 45lbs today. He’s still every bit as cuddly as he was 6 years ago. Last night he was in tears because “I want to be you wittle boy forever, I don’t want to be a teenager” *sniff* Me too sweetie. Happy Birthday little man!

Windows 7. I bought my laptop in July last year and I am eligible for the free upgrade from Vista to Windows 7. I bought it at Best Buy so Geek Squad will do it for me. But I’m getting mixed info on whether they will reinstall my programs & my settings. I’ve been told “oh no, that’s all on you.” and “if you bring a back up drive we will” and “oh all your stuff probably should be just fine.” I so don’t want to have to reinstall all my stuff. Apart from PSPX2, all my software was downloaded, the licenses sent to me via email. Lightroom, CS2, tweetdeck, window live writer, picasa, cooliris, audible, flickr & smugmug uploaders…drivers so I can see my RAW .nef photos thumbnails & .psd thumbnails. Firefox and it’s add ons.  My email! OMG all the issues I had with my email programs & importing. Not too mention all the backing up I’ll have to do of photos, scrap stuff, documents, recipes, music, fonts and audiobooks. And that is just the stuff I can remember. So. ...

  I haven’t had much time to get my photos off the camera this week, but I have a few.   I finished crocheting a pair of fingerless gloves My blight on the landscape I used this on Wordless Wednesday Last, a bowl of Mint Chocolate premium M&Ms For more weekly winners please visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom .  Thanks for stopping by!

My children are early risers, like so early we have a rule that you are not allowed to leave the bed before 6am or disturb your parents before 7am. It is actually sort of nice on school days. They get up, get dressed and occupy themselves with books or the Wii or playing with the action figures until we get up at 6:40 and make breakfast. I currently do not have the hassle of having to get up even earlier to wake them & get them dressed etc. Because of their early rising I can sleep in a bit. But. They catch the bus at 7:20am and there I am – awake for the day and it’s too early to many things, like make the assorted phone calls usually I need to make or go to the bank, pay the electric bill, etc. I drag out my morning with a second cup of coffee and blog reading but still, I’m ready to get on with the day by 8:15. So I head to the gym & spend an hour or so working out. This generally puts me close to 10am. I  stop by the grocery store in the same plaza to pick up what...

Have you noticed the word verification for blog posts is getting a bit graphic? About half the blogs I visit have word verfication you have type in to post. Lately they have been doing this fake out reload thing that makes me think it’s going to post so I move on to the next tab with the next blog and only as I am going back to close tabs do I see, momentarily as the tab closes, that what actually happened was the page reloaded with a word verification form to fill in. Only I’ve already closed the tab. So I go back into my history, reopen the tab, likely having to redo the comment, press post, wait for the reload and then I get the word verification form. It’s mildly irritating but what has been the saving point for me are the words that have been given to me: LUST FELLATIA ERGASM PENIAL INTERLUDE FORPLAY ORVARY SULTS These are just a few of the ones I have seen this week. Last week the words all seemed to come from the posts themselves. If the post mentioned flower...

A rare moment of peace & quiet Monday at the end of a 4 day holiday. They were watching the Penguins of Madagascar on the TV in our bedroom. later we would have epic drama over practicing TKD forms before class, but this was nice while it lasted.

I’ve been working my way through the pile from the library steadily. The first book I finished was Stuff White People Like: A Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions I’ve followed the blog since early on so most of it was not new to me. I find it very funny. However it did confirm that, as I have long suspected, I am not the right kind of white people. The right kind of white people are liberal urban dwellers who shop at IKEA and Whole Foods and love the outdoors.  I am a moderate rural dweller who shops at Wal Mart and is outdoorsy in that I like getting drunk on patios. But I know the right kind of white people, so I find the book very funny. Then I read Secrets of the Tudor Court: Between Two Queens Which is a fictional account of the life of Anne Basset, who was a real person and a maid of honor to Henry VIII’s 3rd through 6th wives and may have had a brief affair with him. Surviving documents show...

  A few for this week. Dying daisies Lunch Deep in concentration He did quite well at the pinewood derby Ashes For more Weekly Winners please visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom . Thanks for stopping by!

A month or so ago I cleaned out my freezer . Yesterday I cleaned my refrigerator. This is a different thing than just cleaning it out. Cleaning it out mostly involves taking most of the food off of the shelves, sorting it and putting the good stuff back. Maybe wiping up some visible spills. But not getting behind or under things or dealing with the bottles on the door. Cleaning it involves taking all the food out, all the bins out, plus disassembling the shelves and scrubbing them & the inside of the fridge all clean. This happens as rarely as the freezer cleaning for much the same reasons – it’s cold, my hands cramp up from the scrubbing and the solid yet still gel like substances that accumulate in dark forgotten corners are a PITA to get clean. Plus the heavy tempered glass shelves are too big to fit in the kitchen sink and have to be washed in the bathtub. Which means I then I have to wash the bathtub. And mop. I never manage to clean the fridge without getting dirty wate...

It is 37 degrees today which is a veritable heat wave given the past 3 weeks. It’s warm enough the heat pump actually stopped running a few hours ago for the first time in days. At least, I assume that is why the heat pump stopped running and not some darker, more expensive reason. The problem with a heat pump is it blows cool air. When you are already cold, having a cool draft blow around your head does not bring you joy. Instead it makes you think longingly of radiators while you go in search of another layer to put on. All the sliding glass doors and French doors don’t help either. Double paned maybe but still a chill comes off those 36 square foot areas of glass. Not to mention the little gaps from the ‘settling’ of the French doors that I am constantly finding & plugging. Or from them sticking & therefore not being shut all the way by the people using them. I spend most of my days in an undershirt, a long sleeved shirt,a sweater, warm socks, and slippers. Sometimes...

  I just have a few from my 365 batch today Fingerless gloves I’m making Aren’t you a little short to be a droid Stay away from my DS game My 2009 365 book came in the mail Havoc in his balaclava For more Weekly Winners please visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom .  Thanks for stopping by