A Plan

...oh, you must be so sick of hearing about this crap... but I have nothing else to write about, nor have I anything else on my mind....

Last year, in the weeks prior to Baby Fangs' birth, I cleared out the big walk-in storage closet that we have upstairs, with the idea of turning it into a play area for High Intensity. It took forever, as you can imagine, and I ended up with about 16 garbage bags full of crap to give away. 95% of it was kids' stuff, 4.999999% of it was mine, and the rest was you-know-who's. "The rest" consisted of three items:

1. A Hawaiian shirt (ugly)
2. An African recipe cookbook (useless, old, ugly)
3. An empty "Pope Cake" box with pictures of John Paul II on the sides (oh for fuck sakes)

Naturally, each one of these three items was shoved deep down inside a different bag in the hopes that he would not notice, but, ha ha, well, I don't call him Mr. IQ for nothing you know, he's no dummy, before the bags went out he did a careful inspection of everything and dug out his three precious items. He then proceeded to fight like the devil to keep each one.

"Look, this has recipes for groundnut stew... and soup... and relish!" he said, skimming through the pages of the cookbook, "what if we want to make them one day?"

"Then I'll take your UNTASTY nuts," I screeched, "GRIND THEM and MAKE THEM INTO SOUP, STEW AND RELISH!!!!!! AND I WON"T NEED A RECIPE!! I'LL WING IT, AND HAVE A MIGHTY GOOD TIME DOING IT!!!!"

"Calm down," he said, instinctively drawing his bunched-up Hawaiian shirt towards his loins, "no need to get so crazy about it."

Well, to make a long story short, I cajoled, coaxed, pleaded, implored, wept, threatened suicide, threw plates, tore out my hair, tore out his hair, ran around the block in a naked, blind rage screaming hysterically, but no, nothing would move him, he would not part with them.

So they went into the basement.

Reminiscing about this has left me rather worried about this weekend, I must say. That was three items. THREE. And each one was a battle (that I lost.) He's got a basement of crap to cull through this weekend with his dad, and while the books are probably going into temporary storage, he has promised to get rid of as much of the stuff as possible. A conservative estimate would show that we have approximately 8,987,534 items of stuff down there, and if he couldn't give up THOSE three stupid, useless items, oh my goodness, what kind of scene are we in for this weekend?

Luckily, I have a plan.

Probably only Nitroglycol will truly appreciate the genius of my plan, because he is the only one of you twelve or so regular readers who actually knows Mr. IQ personally, but anyway, the plan is this:

I will stand at the top of the basement stairs with a timer. High Intensity will stand by the stereo. When I give the signal, she will press the play button, and a very loud, obnoxious snappy tune will fill the air, some crazy German techno perhaps, or maybe something from Bolero. Pepped on by the crazy, intense beat of the music, Mr. IQ will hurtle himself down the stairs and frantically fill a box as quickly as he can. He will get exactly 35 seconds to do this. He will then run back up, thrust the box into his dad's hands and turn to me for his reward (a shot of booze, a peek at a girly magazine, whatever it takes, man, whatever it takes.) Meanwhile his dad will run out to the truck, and, making screechy noises for effect, vroom away to the thrift store around the corner, who will have been warned of our operation in advance. He'll slow down the truck, toss them the box, and vroom back. We will repeat this ad nauseum all day until the basement is empty, or Mr. IQ drops down dead, whichever comes first.

Ooooh, I'm very much looking forward to this weekend now.