A Quiescently Frozen Flap

This Contract is made on ___May31______________, 2011____, between

Eileen Parks, of ___4 Moons Manor______________________,

and _____Archer and Lucy Parks_______________, of __________same address_________________,

For valuable consideration, the parties agree as follows:

1. No child will utter the word "Popsicle" before 10am. Similarly, there will be no utterance of any words synonomos with popsicle including frozen confection, pop, ice treat, ice, italian or otherwise ect. ect.

There will be a daily limit on popsicles once the mid-morning phase of the day commences. To be determined by weather and supplier vendor ("Mother"). Once either child meets the limit, then popsicle availability ceases.

This agreement stands even if one or both children of 4 Moons Manor has a subsequent visitor who arrives after the limit has been exceeded.

There will be no howling protests if one sibling eats a popsicle in front of the other who has previously exceeded their daily limit.

2. No modification of this Contract will be effective

unless it is in writing and is signed by both parties. This

Contract binds and benefits both parties and any successors.

Time is of the essence of this contract. This document,

including any attachments, is the entire agreement between

the parties. This Contract is governed by the laws of the

Ad Hoc Parental Organization _______Summer_Frozen Confection Sanity Savers____________.

The parties have signed this Contract on the date specified

at the beginning of this Contract.

Eileen "Don't Ask Me for another fucking popsicle" Parks

______________________

Signature

Lucy "Can I please have a popsicle for breakfast" Parks

Archer "I deserve one more popsicle even though I've had five" Parks______________________

Signature

By:____________________

Rack'em Up

..And seven months later, I at last figure out how to get this image of two conjoined Spongebob kiddie bath towels up on my blog. God, I really fold easily. But not as easily --or as satisfying-- as these towels fold. Here’s the big reveal, Flap nation: I feel like I’m finally starting to get on top of things (things=terrifying piles of laundry, sacks of junk I’ve painfully sorted and have destined for the dump, my friend’s kids, the thrift store, only to have my kids discover the contents and blow it all over the house AGAIN. Talk about recycling. OK, Let’s not.)

Anyway, this image is the poster child of my insanity about having a clean house. Every time I freak out and think I can’t handle my filthy house for another second I always start the road to a neater house by folding these two towels to make this goofy face complete. There. That’s better. The house will be organized in no time now!

That's how bad it is: I’m so awful at housecleaning that I actually feel like I’m well on my way once I get those towels folded. Yeah, go ahead, put me in your prayer chain, dedicate your next yoga practice to me, run it past your analyst and let me know what they think. It can’t hurt.

No wonder I can’t get this place clean, if my standard for turning this crap-barge around is beginning with matching up two novelty towels “Mad Magazine style”, was there ever any hope?

Ah, the eternal refrain. No, not hope, but my desolate, shit hole of a house. Will it ever end? Actually it will, at least at this current location. I can’t say it’s the main reason, but I’ve often joked this house is so disgusting that I would rather just start over and buy a new one. And that’s what we did. Our new pile started out as a chicken coop and used to belong to a New York Harbor Tug Boat Captain and it looks like the set of Wes Anderson movie that never got made. Gene Hackman would make a great ex-tug boat captain living in land-locked Vermont, right? The hall closet games include Columbo and The Godfather.

Who the hell would play a "The Godfather" board game? “You iced a member of a rival Family, move three spaces.” “If you draw this card, you can help move the Godfather from his hospital room at any time and earn 50 pts.” I requested that the seller leave those games EXACTLY WHERE THEY ARE. Gonna play me some Godfather and Columbo in m’new chicken coop house!

But we haven’t moved in yet, so let’s return to our sub-cellars of crazy tour at the current Flap locale. Now that you've seen the towel rack, let us move to exhibit B, which, if you are up on your anglophile detritus you will correctly ID as a toast rack.

A ratty little toast rack I acquired possibly at our registry, (how did that get past Flap dude, though?) possibly at that pretty big thrift store at 19th and Mission when we lived in The City. I have lugged this pathetic toast rack around for years and years. What kind of world did I think I would be living in where a toast rack would be required? Yet I still cling to all that I believe a toast rack can offer Or rather, the kind of life I suspect I will have for me and my family if I was of the toast racking utilizing sort.

What’s a toast rack for, you wonder. Well, bread gets toasted, cut in half, (diagonally) and the pieces go in the toast rack. Then your butler puts the toast-laden rack, the London Times Literary supplement, a pot of coffee and a fresh daffodil in a Wedgwood vase and brings it to you in your study. You eat the toast, drink the coffee, grab your bowler and bumpershoot

and scoot off to an afternoon at the Reading Room at the British Museum or the Bodleian,

depending.

You see, I have a theory that all this housework we are drowning in can be vanished away if we dial it back to the toast-rack using days. A time when a breakfast table was set the night before. And the children were tucked in bed with hot milk and a biscuit. After reading a chapter of

The Secret Garden to them. Just like you can reconstruct a skeleton with a chip of a femur bone, I suspect that if I just start with one thing--in this case the fucking toast rack--we will be on a road to security, sanity, and sanitary conditions.

And I know that I am referencing a world where maybe this pleasant life was only possible because the household ran on a set schedule. And it was enforced by a Head housekeeper, valet, butler, stable boy, and chauffeur. And I know that all those positions don’t exist anymore. Well, they do, but it’s all rolled into one.

And I know it’s me.

And now we know the feed-back loop is complete, and this rant will never, never end.

Happy New Year.

Prelude to a Flap

There’s a new policy in the Flap Household, effective immediately:

“When you find pulsating mouse, it’s time to clean the house.”

It’s kinda my new mantra. Want some advice, Flap Nation? If you smell something bad, keep searching for the reason. Don’t let the Flap dude tell you," Oh, that’s just your sensitive nose again." Well, yeah it is, and it’s my goddamn super power so why not take advantage. It’s not every time you come flying in at the finish line of a road race I dismiss it with a “Oh, that’s just because you are a gifted runner” So don’t go all Cassandra on me with my uncanny gift of sniffing (and complaining!) about bad odors. My ability to sniff out trouble just might save this Flap family one day. It certainly saved us from having a dead mouse join our household long term.

I keep thinking about how long it must have taken that mouse to rot -- and it was more or less in sight. We have this couch that splits into two pieces. Naturally my kids take full advantage of this fact, always moving the pieces around. One section had found it’s way about ten inches away from the wall. Our dumb cat must have had her shit together one night, or maybe the mouse was drunk or something, because she got a rare notch on her Mouse Kill belt some time in early June, I’m guessing. Left its toyed-with carcass right behind the couch. One glance to the left upon walking in the room would have revealed all. But this family does precious little glancing. It does mostly guitar noodling, face book gazing and repeatedly asking for Popsicles. Leaves precious little time for checking for dead rodents behind couches.

I kept thinking the pee-pee smell was just that sharp twang a house can acquire when the weather’s been damp. Kinda like how a lake house rental smells: a blend of water-logged James Patterson paperbacks, brown-speckled ceramic mugs from the 1970s and lacquered pine paneled walls. It's not without its charms, I find.

But yesterday morning was endgame for the pee pee smell. I got backup on the “lake house effect” funk from the flappette. She walks in the living room and bam, claims she’s smelling something bad. Thank fucking god, someone else smells it, too. I was so sick of sniffing sofa cushions. I was beginning to fall prey to a whole different form of gas-lighting, if you will.

And I was getting really sidetracked with odor detection. Because the living room window had been left open the night before the morning of the big pee pee smell reveal, I had become convinced that the smell was connected to the spilled gallon of paint in the garage that the house painters discovered upon showing up for work that morning. I was envisioning a rampaging family of skunks, trashing the garage then moving on into the living room for a group spray or something. Turns out the Flap dude just slammed the garage door on the bucket and tipped it over. I think he also shattered Occam’s Razor when he pulled the door down. How the hell could I think one event had anything to do with the other?

Here’s why I didn’t just stop at There Must Be a Dead Animal in this Room when the smell wouldn’t go away. Are you ready to find out why? It’s a really sad reason. I thought I already knew what that smelled like because sadly, this isn’t our first PME (pulsating mouse event. )

A few years ago I was trying to finish both grad school AND The Deathly Hallows. A tricky combination of objectives. I would find myself on the couch reading about the final battle instead of say, writing a paper about sexual tension between Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny or whatever the hell it was I did to get my degree. But my Potter joy kept getting disturbed by a smell that made me think the gas was left on the stove. I kept checking, but even though the stove was always fine the smell wouldn’t go away. Cue to my calling Bob and insisting we lift the couch. And now cue The Blowing Curtain.

So now I know, and now everyone in the Flap nation knows: sometimes a rotting mouse smells like propane gas, other times, it kinda has a pee pee twang.

Why the two distinctly different smells of the same dead species? Does this mean there are other possible odors on the rotting mouse odor spectrum? Could be. But I think the Flap household has contributed plenty to this small arena of Rancid Home Science already. We’re all done here.

Which leads me to the positive side of this PME. That is, if you like deep rants. From this an irresistible urge to purge all my Needing a Tidy House demons has surfaced. So this long mouse rant, I can now reveal, was merely a prelude. An instigating event that benefits anyone in the Flap Nation who likes their Flaps in Deep Rant mode. It’s coming. Strap yourselves in and slap on your spelunking lamp and be warned: a little part of you ain’t coming back.

GET YOUR MONEY BACK! The briefest of Flaps in which I share My Latest Fantasy

GET YOUR MONEY BACK!

That’s the name of my new pretend food column that, if it were real, would be in Sunday Circulars. Right next to those ads of pull-on polyester pants in a range of pastel shades. It would focus on ways to use up all the weird horseradish, mint jelly and plum vinegar's rotting in all our cabinets and fridge doors. It includes ways to combine the questionable condiments with shit like random grains you bought on a health kick. I’m talking Red Curry Quinoa. Every recipe closes with “Eat it and...GET YOUR MONEY BACK! This column was surely borne of my sick game I call “Takin’ it down to the mustard” in which I refuse to buy anything at the store save milk for my kids until I am satisfied I've used up enough foodstuffs in the freezer, fridge and pantry.

The “mustard mood” strikes without warning. It certainly never surfaces as an actual budgeting need. I just get sick of going to the store sometimes. If it keeps up this week, I’ll be serving lasagna pasta shards with dried mango and withered (not on purpose) endive. With radish garnish. Ever wonder who’s buying all the damn radishes in the store? Why they even put them there? Thank the Flap dude. He doesn’t shop much, but when he comes back, there’s always radishes in the sack. WHY??

But anyway, back to GET YOUR MONEY BACK! People will see me in the supermarket and chant the phrase back to me and I will pretend that it’s the first time I’ve heard it. At least that day. Also, if this column were real my photo would show me with my head cocked to one side, can’t figure out if I am looking at the reader accusingly over my glasses, or if my glasses are dangling from my hand, which is resting on my chin.

Also the column would be full of hot food tips like: “Store your flour in the freezer to keep rats from chewing through the bag, because if rats eat your flour they stole from you and you won’t GET YOUR MONEY BACK.

This thing won’t stay a Sunday Circular Column for long. People are tired of rats chewing through their flour bags. And though we may have no one but ourselves to blame for that bottle of white truffle oil, liquid smoke or vegetable biranyi paste, when has that ever stopped an American from ranting? This thing’s gonna take off like it’s got Thai Chili Paste on its ass.

In closing, I would like to offer this food-related anecdote that Flappette just told me: “Whenever I fart I feel like the food inside me is yelling EARTHQUAKE!!!”

Yeah, Red Curry Quinoa will do that to ya.

An open Flap to Der Blueberry Haus:

What’s the German phrase for go Fuck Yourself?

I’ve heard rumbles from the flap-nation that everyone has had more than enough time to read the tung oil flap. OK, then, let’s focus on intolerant asshole blueberry growers for a change of pace. I’ve been wanting to flap about this since my last visit--and I do mean LAST--to that quaint little Guilford, VT spot, Blueberry Haus. At last, I’m gonna get m’flap on about this irritating event last July.

In my short time living here, this Pick-Your-Own spot has grown into a quite a bustling Crap merchant. Sure, I thought it was schlocky, but I resisted the urge to judge. l worked extra hard at it, because it’s very clear that the family who runs this place is super evangelical christian. They have a giant bible at the cash register to read between sales. They sell these homemade CDs of their family singing gospel music. WHATEVER I would tell myself. They are pleasant enough to their customers and there's no reason to take their goofy (to me) beliefs personally. Go ahead, sing all the damn day about the old rugged cross and read Leviticus 'till yer eyes dry out, makes no difference to me.

How did we end up spending our blueberry dollar at this den of hokum? At first we chose this spot because it was near this cute library where we liked to go for story-time and a picnic. Back in the day when it was just me and the kids trolling around looking for shit to do until bedtime, this story-time/blueberry picking combo was an awesome time filler. Plus, you got blueberries. They grow them under nets which creates a unique pick--not so sweltering. And I really dug the kid containment those nets gave me. I love that rare combo of not having to actually see your kids yet know that they are in the same spot as you.

After the story time era wound down, we still had der Blueberry Haus on our radar. I knew where it was, what the deal was, like where to get the junky bowl for picking and all that jazz. I knew there were classier joints to pick: MacArthur's, Dwight Miller, Green Mountain Orchard. We somehow had a fondness for this place and just kept ending up there every time. But I first got wind of some extreme shifts for this already dangerously kitschy scene when Anne called on day early in the blueberry season this past summer:
“have you been to Blueberry Haus yet?”
“No, why?”
"They have this new sign up at the entrance to the bushes. It says No Samplin’--this is a place of business and No Cussin--this is a family place'. "
Huh.

We both agreed that all this made us want to do was stuff our mouths with blueberries, spit them out and yell SHIT! These blueberries suck!" Don't ever tell the two of us not to cuss. (Reminds me of the time Anne was helping me set my library up summer before last. Her kids don't go to the school where I work so she was unfamiliar with all the different signage. There's one sign that's particularly pervasive that informs you that Kindness is Spoken Here. When she pointed out the sign we made the simultaneous joke that it's too bad we only speak fluent Fuck You.)

And I don't quite recall at what point this family got the impression that once you arrived to pick blueberries you would then be inspired to stock up on CCZ (shorthand for what Bob calls Crazy Crap-a-zola.) And this Blueberry stand was--is--without a doubt the finest purveyor of Crap in the greater Southern Vermont area. It's the Crap Emporium, bar none. It’s gone from just selling U-Pick , to shilling face lotion with religious scripture on the labels, the de riguer jars of jams-n-dilly beans, candy, candy, candy, ice cream and STUPID RACIST PLAQUES.

Yes, Flap Nation, this place shills those horrible wooden signs with slogans that pass for humor in middle class kitchens. Signs that espouse the medicinal power of chocolate for harried mothers, signs that passively aggressively validate gossip, and just generally make jokes about having fat spouses, eating too much, and having a messy house. I've noticed these signs every time I picked at Der Blueberry Haus. It's hard not to, there are maybe a hundred of them hanging all over the place, and I had to have something to do while my kids finished their ice cream. Up till last summer, they have all been unoriginal, stupid, bland, useless, and just generally a dismal way to spend eight dollars. But we've had a general election since the last time I was giving this place my blueberry dollar. And something tells me this family isn't pleased with the result. For there, nestled among the "If you don't have anything nice to say, sit next to me" and Bless this Mess signs was a new addition:

"1.8 Million People Attended the Inauguration and only 14 Missed Work."

At first I didn't get it. Really. It's been so long since I've heard a racist joke. And at first I thought it was a joke about democrats in general. However, my childhood was spent in South Carolina so many things came flooding back to me upon reading this sign. And then my reaction was, "Really, you wanna hang this awful sign in your house, and just read it every day??!

That was enough for me.

KIDS!! C'mon, we're blowing this blueberry stand.

Tung's Will Wag

There are now three people in the Flapdoodle Marriage. Myself, the Flap-dude, and a gallon of Tung Oil. Let me explain. Since 1998 I have been happily married. Just me and the dude, no tung oil, or even the hint of the tung oil interloping to come. But I now fight mightily for Flap-dude’s affections night and day, and will continue to do so until this slightly rusted vixen gets drained to the last drop. And at the rate she’s willing to spread, it shouldn't’ be too long. But I’m gonna win. Tung Oil can’t make tuna salad just the way the FD likes it. (straight from the can into a bowl with tomatoes and avocado DON'T TELL THE TUNG OIL I am barely winning this war. )

It all started, as these things always do,subtly, innocently, frugally. Well, these are the ways into his heart, anyway. He came back from one of his favorite haunts with his usual load of --to me--incomprehensible DIY supplies, trinkets, and baubles. I've stopped even asking what the hell all this junk is for. But even I couldn't help noticing this coy, square jug with the old lady table on the front.

"What's this?"
"Not sure, really but look, it was only a dollar! And! Not only was it only a dollar, look how much it originally cost!"

I peer closely at an old tag from a long-extinct chain of hardware stores: $54. In 1984 prices, that's like, $174 dollars or something. She was valuable, but got at a bargain. And so it began.

As the days went by, I kept noticing odd webpages open on my browser. eHow pages on the uses of Tung Oil. Wikipedia entries as to its origin. (Flap dude confessed that since he wasn't sure how to spell tongue he wanted to find out if maybe it was from some animal's tongue. ) And then I started seeing new odd jobs popping up around the house. He and his little Tung Oil pal were having a ball all over the property. I come home from the store, there's a freshly tung oiled threshold to step over. That kind of thing. Never mind the ripping off the old siding project, or the new screen door on the porch. Oh no, it's all what can I do with my can of tung oil today. Suddenly, the sander's been broken out and there's all kind of action on the floors. Action of a tung oil nature.

Now, before I flap-out, can I just get an accolade or two for not working blue?*

*It would have been an easy course to take, but if you want to let'em fly in the comments section, please do. Show me whatcha got.

Just Letting it all Flap Out

So here I sit Flap-Nation, half-way thru my fantasy- turned-into- reality wherein I came home yesterday from working my last day at school to an EMPTY, freshly professionally cleaned house, since The Flap Dude and petite Flappers had to motor off to Massachusetts for a little ol' Hall of Fame Awards ceremony since my beloved was a hot-shit cross country star back in the day but I couldn't go cos I had to work so he only gets to show off his cute kids and not his hot wife but that's how I got this time to myself and I think this run-on sentence pretty much sums up the state of my racing mind since I cannot find my co-op bo-ho tranks. And if this sentence doesn't personify the bat-shit crazy, this clip of the contents of my handbag should do it:





I don't know if anything sums up these last chaotic weeks more than the contents of this bag. Truly it has been the repository of my nutty-- sometimes fun--but mostly blurry existence. It has kept a running record of every batshitcrazy moment. And up until I let it all explode on the floor, I'm sure there were sedimentary layers that would have told my crazy history in a more ordered fashion. No matter. Before I disperse/dispense this crazy and put it behind me for the summer, let us take a little inventory and let the contents reveal all:

• An almost-empty bottle of advil-no further explanation needed

• An empty pack from shoe laces bought under duress at Sams because just one (?!) of A-man's laces on his sneaks decided to rot off. He was walking around downtown with a partial lace wrapped around his ankle like some kind of waif gladiator. Homies in the 802 know my pain--who wants to unexpectedly herd two kids into Sams via Main St., collecting the free popcorn on the first floor because god forbid you ever walk in there without availing oneself of the free popcorn before cat-herding down to the shoe dept., scattering said free popcorn all the over the goddamn place. It's true: crazy.attracts.more.crazy.

• My last bag of Yogi brand St. John's Wort tea. Should have bought a case. (BTW you know you are overly stressed out when you find yourself arguing with the inspirational quote on the paper thingie attached to the string. So what smug yogi tea employee decided to include "The art of happiness is to serve all" huh? Well, fuck you, yogi tea, the art of happiness is not needing to mainline your goddamn tea because you feel so goddamn fried every second of every day. Are they just making this shit up? There's no attribution on these tags at all. It's just some asshole in Marin who only eats macrobiotic raw food and makes up excuses for their incessant infidelity by claiming they are just "more in touch in with the universe that way."

• Other assorted shit cuz I gotta wrap this up: free samples from a facial Flap Dude won (last September!) in one his many local races that I finally got after exchanging no fewer than seven voicemail with the facialist. One got cancelled within an hour of the apt. b/c she had to rush her old lady neighbor to the ER. And the whole thing wasn't as relaxing as I had hoped because a goddamn eyelash fell in my eye and I couldn't wipe it out because she had dipped my hands in hot paraffin and then wrapped them in plastic bags and I just didn't know how to tell her that I was in agony. Still, she's the best in the area and it was all worth it. There are also samples from a goody bag from yet another race Flapdude won a few weeks ago. I hope all these little tubes of goo don't just kick around the bottom of my bag until they get all softly tattered and then one day gently spooge out and cover over all my pens and hairbands and coupons and tic tacs and flashdrives and nine-dollar chapsticks. There's crazy, and then there's coated crazy, ya know?

There was one Object D'Crazy that didn't make it into my bag, but that's only because it weighed six pounds and part of it was coated in smelly black mystery paste. Believe it or not, I am am talking about my six-year old's shoes. Not these she's wearing in this screen shot, though. These were the ones she had to wear because of the smelly heavy ones:



There we were last Monday evening, suddenly realizing time had melted away and we had less than ten minutes to get to Flappette's Kindergarten Kulmination Celebration or somesuch. Now, we live one mile from the school, but with only ten minutes to get there and not one member of the Flap household wearing shoes, that ceremony might as well have been in the Yukon. This household needs a solid thirteen minutes for shoe location, retrival,and donning. And I knew Flappette had outgrown her fancy shoes we refer to as "click-clacks", and that most of her other shoes had not surfaced in these last weeks. The only thing I could dig up in these tense minutes was a pair of tattered T-straps that she had outgrown. One of them had a detached sole and the fake patent leather had worn away on both shoes.

When I showed them to Bob he said "Oh, I can fix those, no problem!" And I wanted to believe him as he tramped down cellar to his "workshop" but deep down I knew we were all doomed. For when Bob goes downstairs to "fix things" he generally channels his nutty Dad who also has a knack for patching things up in ways that are too complicated and bothersome in proportion to how much that object is actually worth in terms of one's time or money.

As the minutes ticked by, Bob shouted up from the cellar vague, but encouraging things like "This won't take long at all" and "I know what I am doing" and "Just get everyone in the car, I will be ready in ten minutes."

"But we need to be there in four minutes. " I thought to myself in a small, desperate voice.

I dutifully got the kids in the car and got behind the wheel, ready to roll the second Bob sprang from the house. And he did in a shorter time that he originally claimed. He bounced in the car holding the uh, repaired shoes. They were now covered in what I think was some kind of high-VOC roofing tar, and the toe of one was held in a clamp. He tossed them proudly on the dashboard and said, "These just need ten minutes to dry!"

It is my deepest regret that I was unable to record the image of those stinky shoes in a vice riding on the dashboard. Too busy, too late to snap a photo. But somehow we found her good old brown shoes floating somewhere in the car. We made it on time. I watched my child sing cute songs while my heart almost exploded with joy as I let myself realize that this wonderful child was my own daughter. Turns out I don't need a teabag to tell me about happiness.