havocandmayhem.com

It was a quiet weekend here at Casa de Demons. There was football on tv Sat & Sun.  DH and Mayhem bonded while watching hours of it in the living room. Havoc and I watched random stuff on Discovery in the bedroom. Things about haunted places, underground places, hidden places and a Dirty Jobs episode that must hold the record for most swear words ever. Havoc amused himself by trying to guess the words. Idiot? Stupid? Wicked? Nope, kid. Those are all words you can say on TV. Then there were the explanations about why such and such a person killed themselves & is now haunting the lighthouse. And what’s a prostitute? And what is prohibition & how can I be drinking a beer now if alcohol was made illegal? And why did that guy build a castle in 1890 when castles were built in the middle ages? And what spirits was that lady so afraid of & how were those weird rooms supposed to make them happy? Makes me long for one of those WWII in Color shows. I worked o...

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...

People recovering from bronchitis cannot be expected to compose whole paragraphs, let alone entire blog posts. So, my scrapbooking sisters! Who has signed up for Shimelle’s new class True Stories , which begins Oct 25? It focuses on journaling & I am hoping to get a bit of a jump start on Journal Your Christmas with it. Since this will be my 4th year of JYC I’m hoping to go with more journaling & less scrapping for it this year. Mayhem’s handwriting sucks. Pretty much our entire conference with his teacher focused on that. The problem is that most of the time no one can read his homework or his writing assignments so he doesn’t get full credit. But since that is all that is wrong with him he doesn’t get special writing time, so we have to do it at home. The nice part is the teacher thinks she can get some writing workbooks & things from the special assistance teachers & send them home for us. Havoc is doing fine. They want us to work on his reading comprehension. ...

  It’s been 95-108 here during the day. There is not enough money in the world to get me to turn my oven on. I think we have had sandwiches and raw veggies for dinner nearly every night, except when we had taquitos cooked in the microwave.     The living room is a mess. It’s always a mess. I could sweep 3x a day and there would still be stuff to sweep up. The kids are in and out of it all day long so it hardly seems worth the effort to clean it until they go back to school.       I got a Kindle for my birthday!!!! I bought Tony Bourdain’s latest book, Murder Most Royal by Jean Plaidy and Terry Pratchett’s The Last Continent. So far I have read Plaidy & am about a third of the way through Pratchett.       Actually it is a phrase – gnomic utterances. They are saying that are mysterious and often incomprehensible yet seemingly wise.  I can think of a couple people I can apply this to, we’ll have to see how ...

  Ah Potluck! I took a weight lifting class at the gym Friday and I am so sore it still hurts to type, so this is going to be short this week           Havoc has been spending his allowance on Pokemon cards lately. That was/is the popular thing in the primary schools around here for the last couple months of school. He has a stack of them & trades them with friends & explains every single card to me and how you can battle with them. Silly Bandz haven’t hit here yet. You can buy them but they are have not reached ‘must have’ status     Dinner is still not inspiring me but I made some chocolate cocoa cookies earlier in the week after a big rainstorm. It had cooled enough to use the oven.       The word jar gave me lugubrious , which means mournful, dismal, or gloomy, especially to an exaggerated or ludicrous degree. Probably I can work that into a sentence. I know a couple people that it...

I drank a lot of wine this weekend, so random is really good for me today. I’m not hung over or anything, just sort of weary in that you spent the weekend drinking alcohol in the hot sun way of being weary. DH was on site all week. Meaning he left the house at 6:30am and came home around 10p. Dinner was soup and sandwiches with your choice of raw broccoli or raw carrots. All week long. It’s hot and my most appreciative eating audience was absent so my effort level was absent too   The boys want super hero capes. Mayhem had a Batman cape I made him out of a small black triangle shawl, but Friday he decided he wanted to have pointy ends like Batman’s & rather than asking me for help & he took some scissors to it with predictable results. So we found some fabric yesterday & this week I’m going to make him a pointy Batman cape & Havoc a Robin cape     I’m still sorting apps for my Droid phone. I download 4 or 5 apps that do the same thi...

School has been out for 1.5 days, not counting weekends. My brain is already fried.   I twice tried to make buttercream icing this week. The recipe is here . Maybe I over beat it, maybe the butter was too soft or the flour mixture too thick. Or maybe I just have no clue what real buttercream icing looks or tastes like. I know what Pillsbury icing tastes like and the lard/Crisco heavy icing that you get in bakeries. Possibly I am making perfectly fine buttercream icing & just don’t know it. But it seems grainy not creamy. I’m blaming this on my foremothers who started buying premade icing as soon as it was available. Had they made buttercream icing I would be familiar with it & know what was wrong with mine.   Both boys are signed up for the summer reading program at tiny library and have already checked out 3 books each. We sign up at larger library next week when their program starts. They have different themes this year so the activities are all diff...

I actually had 7 solid hours of sleep Saturday night. Unmedicated. First time since 2002. Sadly I did not repeat it last night so I’m a bit vague this morning.   Havoc got poison ivy over the holiday weekend and spent all last week covered in it. He is highly allergic & one small patch on his leg get into his system and within 2 days it’s popping up all over his body. He could barely use his right hand Thurs-Sat due to the huge blisters on his fingers. So naturally he has just been a JOY to live with. I understand he is not comfortable & it makes him cranky but seriously…it’s been like living with a 2 year old with all the meltdowns everytime things don’t go his way.   My baking quest this summer seems to be the perfect chewy, yet solid granola bar. I can make great chewy bar shaped granola but as soon as you pick it up it crumbles to pieces. I’ve got about a dozen recipes from the interwebs and I’ve been working with them, making small batches trying to...

  Ah Mondays. Potluck is useful to me in so many ways this week. I have no idea what to post about and I have no idea what to serve for dinner either. DH is working 3 hours away from home all week, so he leaves at 6am and gets home at 8pm. Just me & the boys for dinner and I have a hard time cooking meals I know won’t be appreciated by boys (like steak & pierogies) when DH isn’t around to appreciate them. Perhaps I will get a rotisserie chicken tomorrow and serve it in various ways all week. Rotisserie chicken, chicken sandwiches, chicken salad, chicken hash & eggs, and then chicken soup. Actually now that I read it, it’s not too bad with the right side dishes.   Obviously I am not rocking in kitchen right now. I’m in a dinner slump. But I came across these on the web Friday and it was this major epiphany experience. I went from not knowing they existed, to knowing about them, to possessing them in less than 60 seconds. I couldn’t not buy them. (pos...

I’m enjoying the randomness on Mondays. Takes the pressure off having to come up with a coherent post. From jumping around other potlucks I’ve seen some topics I want to use & have some of my own so I made little buttons to remind myself to keep my randomness from getting to random as it were.   I’ve been doing more baking this week. I made more peasant bread and I came across this post at Bakerella and immediately got up from the computer and made them right then. This week I am going to make this chocolate cobbler recipe which I came across while the cookie bars were in the oven. Otherwise I would have gotten up from the computer and made it right then.     You may have read earlier where Havoc accidentally brought a toy gun to school & was suspended for half a day . Yeah. I am still in a full on panic about that. I keep constant track of all the Nerf guns in the house now. Even when I know they are not in his backpack I still have to go ...

It’s Monday and I am so wishing it was another weekend day. DH went camping Saturday night and I never sleep well when he is gone. The boys were up at 6am as usual. They made me breakfast which was really sweet, but I didn’t actually get up until 7am, so that  was some soggy cereal. I should plan my weekly menu but once again I am just not feeling it. I know I want to make lasagna one night & steak and pirogues. Havoc wants tacos too. Probably I should make something with chicken one night but I am so tired of chicken. In baking news, Saturday I made the Pioneer Woman’s chocolate sheet cake. (I’m too tired to track down a link but it’ll pop right up if you google it). It was really good but apparently ‘sheet cake’ is a different size in her neck of the woods. Where I live it means 9x13 pan. Other places it means more like 12x15. So consequently l had to cook it twice as long. It was still delicious though. I made butter cream icing which I hadn’t had in years. The but...

It’s May already! I swear it was just February and I was sure Feb would never end. It seemed like there would always be piles of snow. It was 90 degrees and humid yesterday. That’s late July weather. Apparently spring has come & gone already. We had to buy Mayhem new shoes yesterday. The ones he has been wearing for the last 6 months are still too big for him. They’ve been worn out too and they literally fall off his feet when he sits in a chair, if his feet don’t touch the ground. I had bought him a  size 1, thinking he would grow into them in a couple months, since he had outgrown the child’s 11s in about 4 weeks and the 12s seemed an exact fit. The 1’s had that thumb’s width of space in them they recommend. Except his feet have not grown an inch. The 12s still fit perfectly. I got the 13s this time. He said they were too tight. Yeah, well you wear shoes 2 sizes too big for 6 months and I’m sure properly fitting shoes do feel tight. Havoc has a new insult word – hippi...

Today’s post is random because I am tired. I’ve been fighting the unmedicated insomnia fight since Christmas and for awhile there I was winning. After 3 solid years of Lunesta induced sleep I was off the meds and actually sleeping some, most of the time, by mid-Feb. I filled my last Lunesta prescription on Nov 30 and I still have 2 of those pills left. I would have had 5 but it’s been a hard 10 days. Sometime in late Feb the balance tipped and insomnia has been winning over half time time. For awhile there it was various aches & pains keeping me awake & Tylenol PM helped but that soon stopped working. Meditating was never more than 50% successful, neither were the various herbal teas I have tried. Lately I seem to sleep best from 5am until 9am, with a 45 minute period of wakefulness around 6:45 when I get up to get the kids ready for school. So I’ve been getting about 3 non consecutive hours of sleep lately. I’m a bit cranky as a result. Then the boys started night ...