havocandmayhem.com

It’s officially the Christmas season! I am officially having a hell of a time keeping track of what has & has not been purchased for gifts already. I keep having to go back through my emails & match up non-Amazon orders with Amazon wish lists & remove the items. I think I was a little overzealous on Black Friday with a video deal I found & instead of getting the boys one movie each, I got them 3 each. But I am not sure because there was a cancellation in there somewhere. Everything was UPS delivery to arrive tomorrow so I suppose I will know for sure then. I *think* I just have to buy the books & board games still & pick out something for our friends’ kids (5 of them). Books are getting tricky what with every changing reading levels, toys are much too varied and changeable to keep up with, games might be better but games are pricy enough that I’m considering one game per family instead of individual kids. There are some interesting looking cooperative play b...

This week’s photos were taken at the insistence of the boys. We had some bounty hunters join the crew. But there was a slight problem. Dinos don’t like bounty hunters. Boba Fett did try to save Cad Bane. Fett might be the most notorious bounty hunter in the galaxy, but this guy was unimpressed. Meanwhile back among the good guys “Think we should help them?” “Who? The dinos who hate us or the bounty hunters who hate us?” “Good point” For more Weekly Winners please visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom . Thanks for stopping by!

Todays post was inspired by my friend Rinda at Gallo Organico and is taken from the Daybooking site at http://thesimplewomansdaybook.blogspot.com/ I love doing occasional ‘snapshot of my life’ posts. FOR TODAY Outside my window is the lake my parent's’ house is on, and the water fountain the development put in for decoration. I love hearing the water falling in the distance I am thinking that my bronchitis from October is staging a Thanksgiving comeback & I am VERY unhappy about this. I am thankful to have two healthy parents to spend time with over the holidays. My parents are in their early 70s & I am so glad they are able to take my kids for bike rides & go fishing with them From the kitchen there is fudge. DH made chocolate pumpkin fudge, which is chocolate fudge swirled with sweetened pumpkin puree. Texturally it is….interesting. Flavorwise though it is delicious I am wearing capri pants and a tee shirt I am creating a couple layouts for the ...

Ok it’s not wordless. It never is wordless. I always have something to say about any photo I post. But generally not enough to qualify as ‘wordy’ Wednesday and my thesaurus falls short on one word synonyms, beginning with W, for “just a few words or maybe a couple sentences” Wednesday. I suppose this lead in does make it ‘wordy’ this time but really, this has nothing whatsoever to do with the photo, so IMO it doesn’t count in the word total. Anyway, here is the photo. On the 20th of the month I take self portrait for my 365 project. About a week or so ago I noticed that the (proportionally) few grey hairs I had on mostly my neckline area, and therefor hidden unless I wore my hair up, had been joined by new, much more prominent, grey hairs on my brow line & felt this development should be documented for posterity. Because someday I will look at this photo and think “I looked so YOUNG then and had hardly any grey hair at all” and “Why did I always go so long between eyebrow...

begins with a dead battery in the driveway. Much better than a head on collision in Darien GA (2002), a broken timing & alternator belt in Orangeburg SC (1993), a flat tire in Lumberton NC (1999) and a failed transmission in Wheeling, WV (2007). It’s all a matter of perspective. We opted for the ‘wandering through VA, NC & SC’ route and as usual got lost around Lynchburg VA. US29 and SR460 run together there for a bit & then apparently, there is a hidden portal that US29 goes through & then continues on down through the state. We never find this hidden portal. We don’t know the correct magical words I guess. Though lots of other words do get said when 20 miles (and no signs) later we realize we are still on 460 and 5 miles from Bedford, which is WEST of Lynchburg & we are supposed to be near Danville, which is SOUTH. Last year we relied on DinoDino for our navigation & he did fairly well. We did find our mistake a mere 10 miles out that time. But...

Just a few today sunset new toys practice with the +2 lens Hunting season Our 13 year old cat Nefertiti. She has always hated being photographed For more Weekly Winners please visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom . Thanks for stopping by!

I already had the momentum from  writing up lists for packing, so I thought “why not plan for Xmas since you are in planning mode?” And it was good. I know in general what my boys are each getting for Xmas – a Lego set, a movie, a Wii/DS game, a book, a board game & stocking stuffers. Plus one family gift. The specifics of the gifts still need some work. I have the Lego sets (Star Wars battle of Hoth theme) and I got our Batman loving Mayhem a boxed set of the Dark Knight cartoon series. He was going to get the newest Lego Star Wars, Clone Wars Wii game but it’s arrival has been pushed back to March. So now I am forced to find something else. Because 6 year olds do not understand rain checks. Havoc has been talking about playing Battleship for a couple months & I keep waiting to find it in stock somewhere around here, but it never is so I suppose it will go on the Amazon list. I think he’s going to get How to Train Your Dragon as his movie unless he suddenly devel...

It’s that time of year! Time to go to Florida & spend a week with my folks. There is so much still to do. Packing – My packing, his packing, their packing, food packing, electronics packing, DVD packing and then the inevitable ‘no you can’t take that’ unpacking. We took the Wii with us the last couple years. The first year it was fine, but last year my folks put a tv in the boys room & we connected the Wii to it & hardly saw Mayhem all week. I think maybe we can go Wii-less for 10 days. They will have their DSes  & our entire DVD collection to watch during the football heavy moments. I’m having problems with what books to take surprisingly. After all, I have a Kindle now so it should be a no brainer. But I don’t have that many Kindle books yet so maybe I should bring some dead tree books with me. But nothing is really saying “READ ME!” at the moment & my folks mostly read political thrillers & spy novels which do not interest me, so there is nothing ...

I am currently nearing the end of my 3rd Project 365 – A Year in Photos 365 photos for 3 years is 1095 photos. But that is the number of FINISHED photos. How many photos were actually taken to get that one photo a day? In my case, well over 5000 ADDITIONAL photos. That is a lot of photos. 2008 rocked! I love the photo book I have from that year. So many memories captured & at what I feel was just the right age. The boys were 4 and 5 and home most of the day. They played with so many different toys. There were so many things to photograph. It was fun and easy and I enjoyed it so much I decided to do it again. 2009 was good. I have a very nice book from that year. It’s a bit on the small side but that is my own fault for being spatially challenged & not being able to visualize how big a 7x7 book actually is. The boys were 5 & 6 and were in school most of the day for most days. They had discovered the joys of the Wii and the Nintendo DS and computer games. They still p...

The past 60 days, financially, have been challenging. (just so you know we are mostly working with a Dave Ramsey plan, with a few modifcations because we are incapable of doing exactly as anyone tells us) My car repairs. A weekend away DH’s truck repairs My illness. Not that bronchitis is a spendy sort of illness but the fatigue leads to dinner out, take out & poorly planned shopping trips costing more than budgeted. Plus the coming costs we have yet to absorb. Kids uninsured dental appointments & possible orthodontia appt Xmas shopping Thanksgiving with family in FL & the trip costs (several dinners out & two hotel rooms) So DH & I sat down with the budget spreadsheet and had a come to Jesus meeting. (which is much funnier if you know I’m a Wiccan and DH is agnostic) We went over, line by line, everything on the bank statements, added up all the categories & sorted by costs (man that is a lot of money on dinner out & OMG Amazon!), di...

This one is legitimately done as an assignment What I like are the expressions. Gulped & Appetizing both look happy. Neither the boarder nor his landlord look particularly pleased about the payment, possibly the boarder is behind on his rent & still has not paid up. Even the robot seems displeased by the diversity. And Grumbling… at least he is clearly articulating his problem. He’s hungry and that guy with the hot dog (who also resembles the hot dog) is not sharing. It’s not quite up to Havoc’s usual standards but he said those boxes are hard to fit things in.

I’m sure if you have been in a store you have seen the recent issue of Cosmo with this headline Of course my first thought was “Oh Cosmo, you masters of the blindingly obvious. Take his pants off?? Who would have thought that without you?” But then I considered this piece of wisdom from a non-pithy headline, real world position. You don’t want to take his pants off first. First, take his shoes off. Or better yet, have him deal with the shoes before things get too steamy. Think about it.  If you go for the pants first, the shoes get in the way. Sneakers, loafers or god help you, work boots, do not slide easily through pants. Then you have pants tangled around shoes, which is useful if you are into restraint I suppose but gets in the way of your getting on to the ‘sexy strokes he’s been craving but won’t ask for"’ Does GQ run articles telling men these things about women? Or do they run articles like “Sexy strokes you should under NO CIRCUMSTANCES ask for. Let h...

These were all taken with my Droid phone. I still haven’t gotten pics off my camera. Havoc crossing the lily pads. We had some interesting lighting And in the lazy river    Mayhem coming off a slide Playing with the pumper And getting soaked in the bucket tipping For more Weekly Winners please visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom Thanks for stopping by!

I’ve been scanning old photos again, encouraged by Prompt 8 of True Stories. I’ve posted other scans here from time to time along with what I remember of them. My mom, when she sees the blog posts, calls me up and tells me what I remembered wrong or adds details to things I wouldn’t have known at the time. We sometimes argue over who is correct. I tend to think it is me because being 28 years younger than her I have had less time to forget things & fewer memories to crowd them out. This is from my folk’s house in 1975 (as if that is not totally obvious to everyone) What makes this so obviously a photo from 1975? Where to begin… The phone my father is speaking on is mounted to the wall, with a short cord.  You could just barely sit at the kitchen table while talking on the phone. Mostly though you had to stand, so make it a short conversation. Especially if dad was expecting a phone call, which was always. There was no call waiting back then. You can just about m...

I’m sure you have seen that it is NaNoWriMo, aka National Novel Writing Month or NaBloPoMo, National Blog Posting Month. The theory is similar. Write something every day for a month, though NaNoWriMo has a stated goal of writing from scratch, a minimum 50,000-word novel. NaBloPoMo only gets you 31 posts of whatever length you wish. You could combine them of course if you want. I did NaBloPoMo a couple years ago. But it is challenging for me because we spend 4 solid days on the road in November every year and I am not the sort of person who blogs from her phone. I need big, full sized keys to type more than 140 words. And I have this self imposed thing about each post being created on an individual day, not piling up 3 posts to auto post while I am on the road. So I thought I would actually try writing this month. A long long time ago, I created a galaxy far far away. Well, a world anyway, not an entire galaxy. It started out as fantasy world for a D&D role playing ga...

If you are wondering where the blog post filled with photos of cute kids trick or treating in costumes is, it’s not here. And it won’t ever be here this year. We were at Great Wolf Lodge waterpark for Halloween. They had a short haunted hayride & a little ToT seek & find set up to entertain the kids between 6-8pm. Both kids packed bits & pieces of their costumes. They ended up with maybe a dozen pieces of candy (which is fine) I was in a crabby mood because we didn’t get into our hotel room until almost 6pm due to housekeeping being so far behind & then the Bar & Grille place was only doing buffet (for $20!) and we couldn’t just get sandwiches like the last time & I didn’t want a greasy pizza, which was our only other option. And we had to rush everything because we were so late getting our room & I HATE being rushed. So instead of snapping photos I snapped at people. Until someone gave me a margarita, but the kids were in bed at that point. ...