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. ...

Consider this a PSA that doesn’t come with a tragic tale of photos & data lost. Though, considering it has actually been since November since I did a back up, it could easily have been a tragic tale. In my mind I back up my photos to Smug Mug on a near monthly basis. In my mind I burn my digi supplies to DVD as soon as the ‘download’ folder reaches 4GB. In my mind I copy the contents of my My Personal folder to both my EHDs every 3 months. Lots of happy thoughts in my mind. Many of them involving Nathan Fillion, sushi and a deserted beach. But, unfortunately, like Nathan & beach, none of the backing up, copying & burning ever happen in real life quite the way I imagine they do. See, I have a rather selective & idiosyncratic memory due to a combination of motherhood and insomnia. Mostly I remember things that happened years ago and things that happened hours ago. Anything in between is a mystery. So if I actually remember doing a thing I assume it must have b...

We had a mouse problem recently. This meant putting sticky traps all over the cupboards & taking everything out of the cupboards, washing it or checking it for mouse contamination, washing the cupboards themselves & then putting everything back, but in better sealed containers. I should know by now that cleaning anything in my kitchen is bound to provide blog fodder & that I ought to go get my camera for ‘before’ photos before I start. I have no shame. I share my embarrassing bad housekeeping skills with the world willingly because even a bad example is still an example & someone may think to themselves “you know, it has been awhile since I cleaned out my fridge” & be inspired by me. That’s my story & I am sticking to it. My mom, right now, is cursing the day she joined Facebook and gained access to my blog feed. The snack cupboard held no surprises because everything in it is in heavy rotation. It gets emptied & filled regularly & at various...

Deep thoughts I am sure… Yesterday’s photo was under captioned in my opinion, but I didn’t have time to write down everything that I was thinking about in relation to these two socks in the hallway, a mere 5 feet from a welcomingly empty washing machine, only 15 feet from the dirty hamster where they actually belong. Socks whose owners suddenly couldn’t bear to continue the journey carrying them any farther. It was all too much. Those 3 steps they had to climb were the limit of their endurance, if they even made it up them, since the socks are at the top of the steps and the boys are taller than the 3 steps are high. Perhaps their bare feet got stuck to the kitchen floor from the juice someone spilled & then wiped up in a half assed manner, keeping them from attempting the steps & all they could manage was to fling the socks in the direction of the laundry and hope for the best. Maybe the weight of dirty socks is to great for males to carry. It could be that only a...

DH & his team did such an awesome job this summer down at Ft AP Hill that they have job prospects doing the same installation/moderation thing at the NY State Fair and somewhere in Connecticut later this year. Imagine the joy I feel at the prospect of DH spending days, nay weeks, at a time in upstate NY and in Connecticut. And I don’t even know where Connecticut is. Somewhere in the north eastern part of the country. Nowhere within daily driving distance. Yes I just admitted my geographical ignorance to the internet at large. Yes, Americans…bad at geography…stereotypes… etc. Look, once upon a time I knew where Connecticut was. I still can pick it out on the map if you give me a couple seconds. If you give me a full minute I probably can recall the name of the capitol city. OK, maybe two minutes and a lifeline. Sorry. The parts of my brain that used to hold that state info from 4th grade geography have been taken over by the names of every single Pokemon, where i...

I can’t think of anything that would fill a whole blog post so I am working with bullet points today Its freakin hot AGAIN! It had cooled down there for a week or so but it’s back to hovering around 100 I won a contest at Lizzie Made ! I won a spot in shimelle’s Love Your Pictures Love Your Pages class . It ran in July but shimelle keeps all the materials available online for you to work through at your own pace.This’ll by my 4th class with her. I’ve also taken Blogging for Scrapbookers, Learn Something New and of course Journal Your Christmas Note to self – if you think you smell green peppers when you pick up carryout pizza – CHECK THE PIZZA. Take 5 seconds, pull over, whatever, open the box & look because discovering that there are SURPRISE! GREEN PEPPERS! on your pizza at home, 20 minutes later is a real bummer. So’s the drive back into town to get the right pizza. Green peppers are a lingering scent in pizza stores, but not THAT lingering. Green peppers & pine...

  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 ...

One of the reasons I am no fan of travel is that I have bad hotel karma. I always end up with the room by the ice & vending machines, or the elevators, or the side entrance from the parking lot, or with a bed that as a huge dip in the middle, or the a/c that sounds like a freight train charging through the room whenever it kicks on, or with the neighbors who watch TV loudly until 3 am, or end up on a fold out couch bed with a mattress that is mere millimeters thick over hard metal bars. Hotel pillows are terrible, soft, flat things & I hate them. They are too flat to lay on one pillow but piling two of them makes the pillow too high. So I have to travel with my own pillow. Plus I travel with children who wake at the crack of dawn. When I was a child I traveled with adults who woke at the crack of dawn. Does no one I am related to by blood understand that humans are meant to stay in bed until at least 7am, 8am preferably? Oh. And I have insomnia, which makes sleep unde...

So. I promised to make Mayhem a Batman cape, complete with pointy ends, just like Batman. But I can’t sew with the boys around. They are not the problem. They don’t bother me. It’s all the obscene language that accompanies the sewing that is the problem. Don’t get me wrong…I like sewing. Really. I do. It just doesn’t seem that way because of all the swearing sewing causes. It’s not the sewings fault, its the inadequate props. Any sewing project always begins the same way – with the ritual opening cursing of whoever the hell took ALL the effing scissors and failed to put them back where they belong. The curse lasts for awhile and encompasses the whole damn house while I go room to room looking for one effing pair of the dozen or so scissors I know damn well are somewhere in this bloody house and wonder aloud why the hell no one has the common effing decency to replace the freaking scissors when they take them. The ritual opening curse ends when I at last locate some scisso...

but with indoor plumbing and a mini van. Just call me Ma. I didn’t intend for it to happen, it just sort of turned out that way. Yesterday I took the kids off to bible school.  Then I came home to clean. I scrubbed the stove and the oven, then I got down on my hands and knees and scrubbed the slate tile in the kitchen. Then I rinsed it, then I dried it with rags. ON MY KNEES! Mops don’t work well with natural slate, too many nooks and crannies. In between scrubbings,I hauled dripping wet laundry (bedsheets) out to the clothes line and wrung the water out with my hands before hanging it up to dry. (Sorry Mrs Ingalls, I’m not scrubbing the laundry too. I wouldn’t have wrung it out but my washer has developed glitch where it stops spinning 3 minutes early & your only options are to rerun the load from the start or wring things out by hand) I also swept and mopped the wood floors and brushed carpet freshener into the carpets. Thank you god prairie dresses, corsets and m...

(This was originally posted in 2008 but it happened to me again Monday so I am reposting it because it was such deja vu for me) Just a few. All I wanted was to make some breakfast burritos. I needed maybe 6 corn tortillas. Small ones, but knowing how these things go package wise, I accepted I'd probably end up with 12 large ones or 15 small ones & make enchiladas for dinner one night. HA! I was determined to get corn tortillas, not flour. I like corn better, especially for breakfast burritos. I run into Food Lion & scan the 'international food aisle' for tortillas. They only have taco shells and flour tortillas, so I head back to the refrigerated section. There I find corn tortillas. Except....they only come in bags of 100. Yeah 100 tortillas, when I need maybe 6. There are slots for bags of 36 tortillas and bags of 15 large sized tortillas, but the slots are empty. It's 100 tortillas or no tortillas. The boys were very into having breakfast burritos a...

The Holy Lunching Friars of Voondon claim that just as lunch is at the centre of a man's temporal day, and man's temporal day can be seen as an analogy for his spiritual life, so Lunch should (a) be seen as the centre of a man's spiritual life, and (b) be held in jolly nice restaurants~Douglas Adams-The Restaurant at the End of the Universe Yesterday was International Towel Day, a celebration of the life & works of Douglas Adams, my very favorite author of all. I would dearly love to be a Holy Lunching Friar. In the days before children I almost actually was. We went out to lunch almost every day at my last work for pay job. Arbys and the Pig Pit don’t really count as ‘jolly nice restaurants’ because one is fast food & the other a pit BBQ place, but they were our only options besides Sheetz (a gas station that makes good sandwiches) and Mc Donalds. I’ve always said that, apart from the money, it was lunch I missed most as a stay at home mom. The money to g...

School photos… a rant. They are not my favorite thing. The boys’ school has 2 photo sessions every year. One in the fall & one in the spring. The one in the fall requires payment upfront, before the photo has even been taken. Who pays for photos that haven’t been taken yet? Still? In this day and age? How does that business model even work anymore? Frankly given digital technology I expect them to email me my kid’s photo for my approval within minutes of having taken it. OK, I’ll give them an hour or so to get enough photos for a bulk download and email. Heck, I’ll give them 2 days to retouch and then email. And it can be low res and have SAMPLE printed across my kid’s face in watermark fashion to make sure I don’t sneakily print it out myself for nothing. I would pay for that service. That would be worth the price these companies charge for photos. There is no reason on God’s earth these days why anyone should find paying for photos sight unseen acceptable. S...

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 ...

Thursday I bought 2 dressers from IKEA. Each dresser came packed flat in 2 boxes. Friday night we bought a new TV stand and added a new tv to stand on it. The flat box for the TV stand weighed 85lbs. The TV only weighed 55lbs. I spent 4.5 hours Saturday assembling dressers while DH took Havoc and planted trees with his scout troop. Mayhem played Wii Lego Indiana Jones the whole time. Parenting FAIL but it was a success from an uninterrupted assembly standpoint. First I opened Box 1.  There were drawers in Box 1 Do you know what is the last thing the instructions have you assemble is? DRAWERS! Do you know where the instructions are packed? Box 2, with all the stuff you need to assemble first. Why not name Box 2 Box1, since it is the one you need first? The dresser involves the fun lining up of multiple pegs onto one board And of course you can never get all the pegs into the holes without having to lift up some of the ones that did make it in so you can line ...

I went to IKEA yesterday with my friend Mel. I wanted to get a dresser for the boys’ bedroom and she was looking for a desk for her daughter’s room. I ended up buying 2 dressers, each with 6 drawers (4 boxes) and she found a desk with attached side shelving units. (2 boxes) I have never appreciated the space in a mini van like I did yesterday. But of course you can’t just pick up the furniture you want & go. First you have to walk through the marketplace full of stuff to put on or in or next to the furniture you want to buy. Kitchenware, plates, picture frames, bins of assorted sized and materials, garden things, hooks and shelves, pillows and curtains. And lamps. Mel wanted to get a Chinese lantern lampshade while we were there and after pondering the various hanging lamps, that were basically a cord with a plug on one end and a light fixture on the other that you hang from a cup hook on your ceiling (no wiring required) I, finally, at long long last, replaced a standing pil...

I’ve been driving for 25 years, many of those years with junk cars over a decade old when I got them, plus a number of years with cars that were no longer new, even though I purchased them that way. I know a lot about what can go wrong with cars & am fairly good at diagnosing them. I know the difference in sounds between a car not turning over because the battery is dead and a car not turning over because there is a problem with the fuel pump. (correctly identifying this in DH’s truck last month as soon as at failed to start) I know that that horrible grinding noise you hear sporadically while driving is probably caused by your brakes. Either the pads have worn off or there is a problem with the rest of the braking system, probably the rotors. I know how to repair a problem with the radiator hose with a box cutter & duct tape. I know the terrible sinking feeling the engine makes as the transmission suddenly goes out on you while you are driving. (having experienced ...

Not me, but Mayhem. I’m not sure what time he is waking up but it’s around 5am most days I think. I can always tell when he has an early morning because by 5pm he’s a bundle of tired just waiting for an excuse to freak the heck out. The littlest thing can trigger it. Sunday I made pot roast for dinner. He watched me put the meat & the veggies in the crock pot. We talked about potatoes, carrots & turnips & why I was peeling them. He knew what all encompasses the phrase ‘pot roast’, that it is meat & vegetables. But, when 5:30 rolled around he decided he didn’t want any vegetables, just meat. DH said he had to eat a  bite of carrot and the white veg (no way of knowing if it was turnip or potato) and Mayhem lost his little mind. He screamed and he cried and he had hysterics at the thought of having to eat a bite of carrot and turnip. Both of which he has eaten – in pot roast – as recently as two weeks ago, with no complaints. In between the sobs he says over and ...