Normally just after (or just before) October 31st I supply you with photos of the Halloween festivities that pepper my family life throughout the month of October.

Not this year.

I was sick, we were harried, life was hectic.  So instead of the sweet family portrait of the three of us dressed in some sort of unified front I present to you the following iPhone snapshots…

K in her witch ensemble getting ready to fly off to the Monster March

Mike had just enough time to throw on a hat and a crazy expression before getting K out the door to the Monster March parade. I was home sick in bed.

I feel the need to add some text here… just for a visual break between the photos because those two photos up there?  They have nothing to do with this next photo down there.  Completely separate events.  6 days apart… I didn’t take my daughter trick or treating this way, I went to the RCR Halloween Bash dressed as…

... a blood thirsty trampy vampire nurse

Plans are already underway for next year.  They don’t involve a dress that I have to pull down every 37 seconds but there will be cleavage.

It’s that time again babies.  Time for the 2nd annual Kaos Holiday Song Contest.  I don’t know how many of you recall the contest last year but I certainly do.  We had 2 categories with a winner in each.  It seemed to work well so we’re sticking with it.

Last years winners were Deb on the Rocks in the “Naughty” category with a song entitled Santa’s Punish Me Polka (I feel it goes without saying that Santa’s Punish Me Polka contains explicit lyrics and is not for small children or work approrpiate situations) and the winning song in the “Nice” category which is called Rudolph’s Second Song and was written by Jo Beaufoix is all around friendly.  So nice in fact that K helped us record it.  Take a listen to those two songs if you’re so inclined and then listen to this 6 minute podcast explaining a bit about the contest and reviewing the tune this year’s lyrics must be written for.

2008 Kaos Holiday Song Contest

or just listen to the melody its self until your ears are bleeding and you can’t get the tune out of your head! 2008kaoslyriccontest-melody

And now for the rules:

1. Each entry requires a title, a chorus, and a minimum of 2 verses.
2. Entries must be received by midnight Friday December 12, 2008.
3. By entering your lyrics you give consent for us to record perform and present your lyrics with this song in any way we see fit, though you will always be credited.
4. Winners will be chosen by a panel of judges.

There will also be a prize in each category, though it has not yet been selected.

And now you need to write!

Songs must be submitted in one of two categories: Naughty or Nice. If it isn’t Nice, and by Nice I mean child and family friendly then it’s Naughty… If it’s going to be Naughty… make it NAUGHTY. You may submit one song for each category.

Lyrics do not have to contain Christmas content they can be about any winter holiday you celebrate, but it must be a winter holiday or about the winter season.

When you have your lyrics ready please email them to me at: strangelovelive @ gmail.com with Holiday Song Contest as the subject.

All entries will be reviewed by a panel of judges and when all songs have been read, re-read and drunkenly sung at high volume our winners will be chosen.

Questions? Comments? Concerns? Feel free to comment here or send me an email…

Now go on, get started… these songs aren’t going to write themselves.

Back when I was a wee little baby blogger there was a blog that I lurked on.  I laughed and threw up into my mouth a little every week.  I grimaced and grinned at the sick sense of humor and then after a while I started commenting.  That site was Pointless Drivel, the home of today’s guest, Mr. Fabulous.

When I asked Fabby to write a guest post for me I knew there could be some content control issue, but since I am editor and chief of this here bloggy prison I picked my brain, came up with no contingency plan and then waited for my husband to make a helpful suggestion.  For a very odd specific reason I am unable to post this particular guest post without some editing.  But since I hate to put words into someone’s mouth I’ll let all of you do it.  So instead I bring you Thankful Mad Libs with Mr. Fab.  Fill it out and enjoy.  I’ll post my favorite adaptation on Friday.

1.    A title: _______________
2.    Adjective:  _______________
3.    Adjective:  _______________
4.    Addictive substance:  _______________
5.    A decade:  _______________
6.    Same addictive substance.
7.    Store name:  _______________
8.    Noun (plural):  _______________
9.   Adjective:  _______________
10.  Proper Noun plural (person or thing): _______________
11.  Same Proper Noun.
12.  Another Store Name:  _______________
13.  Noun (small item):  _______________
14.  Noun (small item):  _______________
15.  Noun (small item):  _______________
16.  Organization or club:  _______________
17.  Adjective:  _______________
18.  Adjective:  _______________
19.  TV Show:  _______________
20.  Field of Study:  _______________
21.  Adjective:  _______________
22.  Official Organization or Group:  _______________
23.  Plural noun:  _______________
24.   Adjective:  _______________
25.   Adjective:  _______________
26.  TV show genre:  _______________
27.  TV network: _______________
28:  Verb:  _______________
29.  Adjective:  _______________
30.  Part of a house:  _______________

****
Hey. Mr. Fab here, semi-retired blogging icon and -                 -. When the -                 - and -                 - Cami Kaos asked me to do a guest post this week, I could hardly refuse her.  After all, I owe Cami a lot.  She was instrumental in helping me get off-                 - back in the-                 - .

Sigh…I miss -                 - .

In any event, in the spirit of the season, I thought I might share with you what I am thankful for these days.

I am thankful that our backyard is completely fenced in.  Privacy is important.

I am thankful that the ground in our backyard is soft, enabling me to dig large holes on a regular basis with very little trouble.

I am thankful that we live so close to a -                 - ; and that large bags of -                 - can be purchased there at very prices.

I am thankful that there are so many -                 - the area, even if there are not as many  as there was before I moved here.

I am thankful for the nifty lockbox I purchased at -                 - .  Lockboxes are perfect for safeguarding little trophies like -                 - ,  -                 -, and -                 -.

I am thankful that our local   -                 - is    -                 - and   -                 - .

I am thankful for shows like  -                 -that teach us so much about  -             -.

I am thankful that Lexington has an understaffed and -                 -, and that this city does not attract the best and brightest   -                 -.

I am thankful that my time off from blogging has allowed me to pursue a  -                 - and   -                 - hobby.

I am thankful for all the   -                 - shows on the    -                 -, without which I would never have been able to  my    room in the  -                 - .

Now what are you thankful for, other than the fact that you don’t live near me?

This next guest author needs no introduction, because luckily she’s written one into the very first sentence!

***

So, if you’re like me, Melissa Lion of Recovering Californian fame, you’ve talked a big game about how you’re going to cook Thanksgiving dinner FROM SCRATCH because, basically you’re the man with balls of steel and a big red cape that says BIG MAN on the back, except you’re a woman and none of that is necessarily relevant but you want to flex your mighty cooking muscles. And your in-laws (all of them!) are coming up from California to stay in your 934 square foot house and you’ll be cooking for seven people, when you’re used to cooking just for two adults and a three year old. And you have just a day until all this happens, and you have deadlines and a house that needs a light cleaning and by light cleaning I mean a full-on sandblast followed by a spritz of Agent Orange (just for funzies). And HOLY SHIT WHAT ABOUT THOSE DEADLINES?!?

Here’s what you do: you plan your week’s cooking in advance.

Okay, I know that many of you already realize this, but there’s one of you who’s been nodding and gnawing at her fingernails through the previous 191 words. (Hi!)

It wasn’t until last year that I realized that cooking in advance was even an option. Seriously. One Thanksgiving was so very, very poorly planned by a woman with black hair and bangs and pale skin and lots of cleavage (I’m looking at you Miss Kaos…okay it wasn’t her, it was the other Portland lady who fits that bill — *me*) that my family and I wound up in Chinatown getting a chicken. In Chinatown, the chickens are merely de-feathered and not de-footed or beheaded and so we had to ask the nice gentleman with the buzz saw to take care of those unseemly bits.

I don’t want that to happen to the one person out there who had no idea she could cook the meal in advance.

Here’s my schedule for cooking Thanksgiving dinner this week:

Monday: Work on my deadlines and finish cleaning the house.

Tuesday: Cranberry Sauce, Turkey Stock.

Wednesday: Stuffing, Yam and Squash Puree, Pies (apple and pumpkin), Gravy, prepare salted turkey (no brining this year, going with Bon Appetit’s salted suggestion)

Thursday: Turkey, Brussels Sprouts, Potatoes.

See? Easy Peazy!

And to make things even easier, here’s my favorite cranberry sauce recipe. It’s so good, I made it two weeks ago and canned it for the relatives to take home with them.

Cranberry- Pomegranate Sauce with Satsumas

from Seriously Simple Holidays by Diane Rossen Worthington

(The only holiday cookbook you’ll ever need)

3/4 c sugar

1 c pomegranate juice

12 oz cranberries

4 satsumas

1/2 c pomegranate seeds

dash of balsamic vinegar

In a medium, non aluminum sauce pan, combine sugar, pomegranate juice and cranberries. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Reduce the heat to medium and cook, stirring frequently for about 4 minutes, until the cranberries just begin to pop. Remove from heat and let cool.

Add satsuma pieces, pomegranate seeds, and balsamic and mix to combine. Place in a glass container, cover and refridgerate until using. Adjust seasonings to taste just before serving.

Can be made up to 5 days ahead.

Got that everyone? Now who’s going to help me with those deadlines and to clean my house?

Happy Father’s day to all you dads out there… but especially these two. They’re my favorite fathers in all the world and I can’t imagine life without them…

(K and her dad)

(me and my dad)

Welcome to the Kaos Valley Detox and Treatment Facility where we can help you clean up your life…

Messy house? No. We can’t help you there.

Addicted to smack? Nuh huh. No. There’s nothing we can do.

Have a coke problem? Ah now there we can help you… I myself battle with the Cherry devil… it’s hard to resist the sweet bubbly goodness flowing down your throat… but here at the Kaos Valley Detox and Treatment Facility we can help you beat it… at least temporarily…

Want to quit smoking those nasty cigarettes? Um… well… yeah I may not be so much help there because while I did quit smoking years ago I’m not sure I know how I did it. My friend though swears by the patch… you could try that?

Have a horrible gambling addiction? I have no idea what to do for you…

But have you been eating too much red meat, cheese, butter, or sugary foods? Drinking a wee to much wine… imbibing a few too many tropical drinks?

There we can help you. Not by sharing with you any mind bending methods of how to give up the goods… but by holding your hand as we detox ourselves from the over consumption insanity that was the month of March.

You see the month of March was one little party after another. From my birthday at the beginning of the month all the way through my friend leaving Monday we had fun fun fun…

Then my daddy took the T-Bird away.

No. I have no T-Bird… Never did. Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.

Maybe I need to add inappropriate quoting of songs to the list of things I need to detox from…

Nah. I don’t think I’m willing to give that up for any length of time.

What I am doing though is trying to clean out my system a bit.

Inspired by my lovely Mr. Kaos I’m cutting out the cherry coke, red meat, alcohol, candy and all that other good stuff that I had too much of in the last month…

(but just till I feel like a super hero again)

Oh sweet natural energy… I’ve been missing you.

I wrote this long ass post.

well I wrote half of it.

It was all about the early wake up on Easter and stuff…

It was really long.

REALLY LONG

and also really boring. and whiny. and not really funny.

so instead I will tell you that after she was done eating breakfast (I am that mean mom that makes the kid eat BEFORE the fun… because otherwise she won’t eat a thing) locating all her treasures… and opening each egg and revealing the contents of it with delight… and eating a bag of Jelly Belly beans… she wanted to put on her new pretend pop star headset and listen to the Radio Disney hits CD that Mr. Kaos and I got her for her birthday (which was only 3 days ago…)

Let me make something clear; She REALLY wanted that CD and rather than buy her another toy or 10 that she doesn’t need and I don’t want her to have we decided to let her have it. We leave the excessive toy buying to other people.

So like I said we got her the CD and she was thrilled but we haven’t had a chance to listen to it… until this morning…

That’s where the hell part comes in.

Have we covered here on my blog that I love music? I love it with a fierce and fiery passion. I adore music. I’ve spent most of my life LOVING music and… well kind of disliking musicians. One thing is pretty consistent with me though… aside from some crazy 80′s stuff and some gothy club music I danced to in my teens I hate music that has been processed and over produced… music that has had the spirit and the soul ripped from it.

This CD pretty much embodies what I can’t stand about the recording industry these days.

I think I may be bleeding from my ears.

please make it stop…

help me…

please.

So it’s Valentines day…

You think I’m gonna write something all sweet and cuddly fluffy about how much I LOVE Mr. Kaos don’t you?

Or maybe blather on about the mass of hand made cards we’ve pumped out of this house in the last week.

Well you’d be wrong then wouldn’t you… I’m not gonna say lovey dovey pink puffy heart things.

(even though I am thinking those things at a couple of you… oh you sly devil ladies that I love… you know who you are)

Instead I am going to be thoroughly unpleasant but caring all at once…

I’m going to talk about people and their dogs.

Or a man and his dog…

Are you ready?

I have a neighbor with a dog. No big surprise there right? He doesn’t live on my street but because my house is on the way to his kid’s school he walks past it everyday.

He seems like a very nice man.

His dog, it is super friendly and very nice.

When it shits… in my yard… he picks it up. I truly appreciate that he picks it up. So much that I don’t care that it shits in my yard…

That is not me complaining. I’m okay with all of the above…

What I’m not okay with is that every single day his dog goes running blocks ahead and he comes running down the street chasing it. Yelling for it. Calling it in vain.

He has a leash for it.

It is always in his hand.

He saves it for when they get to the really busy streets.

As I was saying he yells for the dog to come to him.

The dog laughs at him (okay… he doesn’t… but if he could he totally would) and runs further still.

This happens every day…. well that, or the man wanders around the neighborhood looking for his dog worried that something has happened to him because when he let him out he ran off. And he’s missing. Because he doesn’t put him on the leash.

Unless he’s at the really busy street.

There seems, to me, to be a simple solution.

KEEP YOUR DOG ON A LEASH WHEN YOU WALK IT, DUMB ASS!

Funny… I seem to be the only one around here that realizes that it isn’t just a good suggestion… it’s the law.

that’s all…

…oh fine… Okay. I’ll say it.

Happy Valentines day

but I’m not buying you any flowers.

For those of you who don’t already know yesterday was Martin Luther King Jr. Day…

It’s a holiday you know.

No, really it is, do you know how you can tell? You get the day off school if you’re a kid… which means you’re home with me… if you’re K that is.

It also means sleeping in. Oh heavenly heavenly sleeping in until 8:15.

(yes, 8:15 was the exact moment that K woke up).

I thought though that a day home from school and no mail wasn’t a sufficient way to celebrate this day in our history so I decided that I would give K a bit of a history lesson and we would talk about what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had meant to the people of this country.

You see she was *so* horrified when she learned that we once had slavery in the this country. She was *so* mortified when she learned that women and African Americans weren’t allowed the same rights as Caucasian men. She was *so* shocked when we explained to her that we were in the midst of our first presidential race where a woman and an African American actually had a real chance at becoming our President (she thought we’d had plenty of women as presidents and was somehow under the impression that MLK had been the president too, I think maybe she has him confused with JFK?).

I thought, given her interest in these areas in the past couple of months, she would be interested in learning more about the man we were celebrating.

I was wrong. She wanted to watch TV that she doesn’t normally get to watch while she’s at school and that I don’t TiVo for her…

Never the less I began to explain the Civil Rights Movement. I tried to go about it gently.

Maybe gently was the wrong way to go about it.

Maybe I shouldn’t have tried to be mild for her delicate 5 year old sensibilities… because instead of being enthused about her history lesson on the Civil Rights Movement she wanted to watch Dora the Explorer…

I had forgotten how much I hate that little cartoon girl…

New Years is not a holiday I go crazy for.

Never have.

My parents would always make a nice dinner and pop some champagne as a kid, but there was no fervor to go out and party, there was no press to be crazy at the house. I don’t recall a lot of importance being placed on NEW YEARS!!!!!

But none the less today is New Years Eve.

The Eve of the new year.

A new year means to me that I need to remember to put 08 on things instead of 07.

It means that tomorrow, a holiday for most, is my lovely man’s birthday.

It means that while K is sound asleep in her bed, like a fuddy duddy, I will be irritated by the midnight fireworks and bottle rockets that will invariably be set off because I will worry that they will wake her up and it may be hard to get her back to sleep.

I’m such a mom on New Years Eve.

But I’ve pretty much always been this way. I’ve never been a big party animal for this kind of thing. I prefer to save my wild and crazy nights for the times that most of the world is quietly oblivious to my good time.

Also, I’m not so much one for resolutions. I tend to consider this; If it’s something that needs to be done I should just go ahead and do it now, then, whenever it arises… not just wait for the year to roll over to something new.

I’m a total downer right?

Okay, I’ll let you in on a little secret…

I don’t hate New Years Eve. At all.

But I don’t like it for any of the reasons most people do.

It marks the end of a crazy season. As much as I like a certain amount of chaos… I like my normal brand of chaos not the crazy sugar, feast, consumer induced brand of chaos.

And yes I know I spent a month talking about how much I love Christmas. I do love it. Until the 26th and then I am done for 11 months.

So in a completely not grumpy way…

Happy New Year!

until next year – xoxo CamiKaos