Plumbing the depths

A couple of weeks ago, I sauntered into our local plumbing supply store and swung my plastic grocery bag full of crusty, fifty-year-old valve stems onto the counter. St. George did not have to work as hard to remove the dragon’s head as I did to remove those valve stems from our shower.

“It took me a lot of swear words to get this far,” I told the guy behind the counter.

He glanced down at the contents of the bag, looked at me and said, “I bet it did.” I’m still trying to figure out exactly what he meant by that.

Of all the things I’ve learned to do through trial-and-error (heavy on the error) around the house, plumbing scares me the most. If you mess up painting a room or installing a new ceiling fan, you don’t have to call the fire department to come drain out your basement. My specialty around our house is more along the lines of light bulb changery, a task that can ordinarily be accomplished by just one of me.

But I fear that I may have inherited my plumbing acumen from my mom. About fifteen years ago, she took a brief but eventful foray into the world of household plumbing. She had been asking Dad to fix the loose handle on the kitchen sink for ages. Their conversations went something like this: “Maurice, when are you going to fix the handle on the kitchen sink?”

“This weekend,” Dad would reply every week.

I love that my dad’s name is Maurice. That’s a strong name. Steve Miller made it even cooler in his song “The Joker,” with that little “wow woooww” on the guitar after he sang, “Some people call me Maurice.” It may surprise you to learn, though, that my dad rarely, if ever, speaks of the pompitous of love.

Anyway, in Dad’s defense, he did buy the replacement parts for the kitchen sink, and he told Mom that all he had left to do was remove the old handle with his wrench and replace it with a new one. In retrospect, he probably should have mentioned something about shutting the water off first.

One day, when Dad was going to be coming home late from work, Mom decided that there was no good reason that she couldn’t just fix the sink herself. The good reason would present itself shortly. She grabbed Dad’s wrench out of the garage and went to town on the faucet handle. After a couple of turns, the handle shot into the air, propelled by a geyser the likes of which are normally not seen outside of Wyoming.

I was downstairs watching “What’s Happenin’?” reruns (and Rerun) when I heard the shrieking from the kitchen.

“Get towels! How do you turn it off? Get towels! Aaaaaahhh!”

The water was shooting hard into the ceiling, spraying in every direction, puddling on the floor and running down the steps into the living room. At thirteen, I had absolutely no idea how to turn off the water without the handle, which was last photographed soaring over rural Maryland. While I was little help to resolve that particular situation, if Mom had needed me to supply her with the cheat codes to get thirty lives in the Nintendo game Contra, she would have been all set.

Eventually, we piled enough towels on the geyser that the water started flowing down the sink for the most part, until the neighbor’s teenage kid came over, went straight to the basement and shut off the main water valve. Showoff.

Plumbing is just one of those things that works out great in theory but doesn’t always pan out in the execution, like those fake wooden gardeners’ behinds that people put in their lawns or the strategic missile defense system.

You can send Mike Todd your wrenching stories online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Just a stone’s throw

The most important thing I learned during my six years as a Boy Scout, besides how to look awesome in a kerchief, is that you should always set up your tent as far away from Mr. Coe as possible. Mr. Coe was a fine man with a good heart and poor hearing, and his favorite activity was clanking pots and pans at 5:30 in the morning as he cooked up what must have been a ten-course breakfast. Why he couldn’t just eat Slim Jims and Fruit Roll-ups for breakfast like the rest of us, I have no idea. But if you had the misfortune of setting up camp anywhere in his vicinity, you’d jolt awake at daybreak, convinced that someone was filming a Braveheart battle scene outside of your tent.

I thought of Mr. Coe recently as I browsed homemade videos on the website YouTube.com. YouTube is a horrible, hypnotic waste of time. Most of the videos that people post there are poorly recorded, utterly pointless and otherwise have little redeeming quality, which makes the hours that evaporate away while you’re watching them all the more inexplicable.

One of the videos, titled “Skipping Record,” showed a middle-aged man, looking like a skinnier version of Jerry Garcia, step up to a river bank and wing a flat stone out across the water. The man stands and watches as the stone pitter-patters on top of the water until it is so far out that all you can see are the tiny little splashes and the barely-perceptible wake that the stone has left behind. The man turns, pumps his fist once and walks off camera. This was the Guiness World Record-breaking stone skip, thrown by Kurt Steiner of Emporium, PA. If you’d like to try to beat it, you’ll have to skip a stone forty-one times. And if your personal record is closer to ten like mine is, you’ll probably need to talk to your local major-league ballplayer about performance enhancement.

Mr. Coe’s son Andy wasn’t too big on stone-skipping, but he was the best overall rock-thrower I’ve ever seen. When you’re on a week-long canoeing trip and the fish aren’t biting, there’s not much else to do at the end of the day but to stand on the river bank and chuck rocks, which we all did enthusiastically. There’s the old legend that George Washington threw a silver dollar across the Potomac River, which might well be true, especially if George enlisted the aid of a cannon, but I’ve personally witnessed Andy Coe easily clearing the Upper Delaware River when most of the other kids were doing good to plunk their rocks halfway across.

One day, we pulled under a bridge near Narrowsburg, PA to eat lunch. Mr. Coe walked up the bank and out onto the bridge, which was a considerable height up from where the rest of us sat.
“Hey Andy, bet you can’t throw a rock all the way up here!” he yelled down, as he turned and shook his behind to taunt his son.

Andy stared at his father for a moment, picked up a walnut-sized rock, tossed it to himself just to get the feel of it, then hurled it up towards the bridge. Too late, Mr. Coe tried to jig out of the way, and he howled as the rock careened off of his shin.

That throw made Andy the Pecos Bill of our scout troop. Every year, the bridge got higher, the rock got bigger and Mr. Coe’s howling became more profane.

I picked up the paper yesterday and saw that Andy just got called up to pitch for the St. Louis Cardinals. OK, I made that part up, but if this story ever gets made into a movie, that’s how it should end.

You can bean an email off Mike Todd’s eyes online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Update: In case anyone gives a hooey enough to check it out, here's the world-record stone skip. This is a different angle than the one I described above, but you can see it better here:

Did you see all forty skips? I might have missed a couple of 'em. But if this guy's nickname isn't the Skipper, something is seriously wrong.

Something offal

While we were at breakfast with my parents at a diner near their house recently, my wife Kara pointed to the side order section of the menu and asked, “What’s scrapple?”

A hush fell over the table as my family tried to think of the most delicate way to describe the local delicacy. Kara grew up in New York State, so she’s unfamiliar with some of the things that make Southeastern PA so special, such as Tastykakes and scrapple, two Philadelphia favorites that have somehow managed to stay mutually exclusive all these years, at least until somebody works out a palatable recipe for Scrapple-Filled Krimpets or Honey-Glazed Scrapple Buns.

We happened to be in town because we were visiting my parents for the weekend on our return trip from a beach vacation with Kara’s side of the family. My folks graciously agreed to ferret-sit while we were away. The varmint loves visiting Grandma and Grandpa, and as soon as we open his cage, he wastes no time burrowing into their couches and making his own little forts out of them. I’m sure Mom and Dad were sad to hand him back over to us.

Now that we’ve burned our shoulders as well as our vacation allotment for the year, Kara and I have several months of frolicking about the hallways at work to look forward to, basking under the light tubes and soaking in the fluorescence. Honestly, it’s a bit of a relief that beach season has ended for us. I have a difficult time foreseeing any potential situation over the next nine months that may require having to take my shirt off in public, assuming that I continue my several-year streak of not catching on fire or being apprehended on the show COPS. Without the Specter of the Swimsuit hanging overhead, ordering French toast, bacon and eggs for breakfast, and slathering all three in syrup, is much more enjoyable.

“Scrapple is a pork kind of thing,” I said. “It’s like sausage. They only make it around here because it’s so good that nobody will share the recipe. You should order some. You’d like it.”

“Oh no. Scrapple’s nasty,” Mom said, “It’s the stuff they won’t even put in hot dogs.”
Kara scrunched up her face. Getting rejected from a hot dog for being too gross is like getting kicked out of Hooters for not being dressed tastefully enough.

“When they’re making scrapple, they use everything but the squeal,” Dad offered, in case the point had not yet been made.

Perhaps the most persuasive argument I can muster for not eating scrapple is this: I’ve never seen my dad eat it. This is the man who, when we were on Boy Scout camping trips many years ago, used to roll open packets of raw, oily sardines and place the little fish on Ritz crackers.

“Ew, Dad, what are you going to do with that? It reeks like cat food,” I’d say, watching with horror. He’d just smile serenely and pop the whole shebang into his mouth as I ran off to get the other kids to come over and watch, like a little carnival barker: “Step right up, kids! Come see the Incredible Sardine-Eating Man… He doesn’t even care that they are obviously not meant for human consumption!”

Believe it or not, when the waitress came back to take our orders, Kara passed on the scrapple. But the experience piqued her curiosity enough that she looked up more information about scrapple on the internet when we got home.

“Scrapple is typically made of hog offal,” she read.

“What’s offal?” I asked.

As she continued to read, her face lost all of the color it had gained at the beach.

“Oh, that’s just awful,” she said.

You can send Mike Todd your favorite scrapple recipes online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Something annoying in the air

If anybody deserves a raise, it’s the person who invented stadium seating in movie theaters. Next in line would be the person who decided to put Cranium on airplanes. Last week, the short flight that my wife Kara and I took from Philadelphia to Charlotte featured a silent slideshow of trivia questions from the popular board game, which kept me so entertained that I completely forgot to defend my turf by bracing my knees against the seat in front of me after take-off, allowing the lady in front to recline her seat until her Aqua Netted hair was tickling my nostrils.

I hardly noticed, though. Trivia is the supreme outlet for a lifetime’s worth of useless information, and there’s no better time for it than when you’re a captive audience, strapped to a tiny chair with a screen directly in front of your face, the only thing separating you from the guy in Clockwork Orange being a lack of eyeball clips, and maybe a tiny bag of pretzels. Two bags if you’re a charmer.

Kara entirely failed to appreciate the genius of this perfect time-killing diversion. She was too busy reading a novel with half-naked (a pessimist would call them half-clothed) people on the cover striking suggestive poses, the suggestion being that the other half of the clothing would be removed by page three.

Tapping her on the shoulder, I said, “Hey, did you know that Massachusetts is bigger than New Jersey? I would’ve thought it was the other way around.”

“Really? That’s interesting,” she said, without looking up. A few minutes passed quietly.

I said, “The Skipper from Gilligan’s Island name on the show was Jonas Grumby. Did you know that? They only said his name in the first episode. I got that one wrong. Do you think the Professor had a real name too?”

“Uh huh,” she said. How could she not get excited to learn the Skipper’s real name? She has no appreciation for the fine arts. A couple of years ago, we saw Mark Linn-Baker, the guy who played Cousin Larry in the sitcom Perfect Strangers, at the grocery store, and she didn’t even care. I was like, “Cousin Larry’s over there by the bagel bins! Let’s go do the Dance of Joy!”

And all she could say was, “Who’s Cousin Larry?”

Who’s Cousin Larry, indeed. Don’t be ree-diculose.

A few moments later, I turned to Kara and said, “Did you know that the wingspan of a 747 is about one hundred feet longer than the Wright Brother’s first flight? That’s just crazy.”

“Baby, I’m in the middle of my book,” she replied.

“Sorry. Are people making out in it right now? I didn’t mean to interrupt them,” I said. I’m allowed to make fun of her trashy romance novels about once a month. After that, I’ve spent all my tokens, and any comments about barrel-chested men and almost-ready-to-love-again maidens must be kept to myself.

All of a sudden, Kara said, “Oh, the flight attendant’s coming with the trash bag. Quick, drink the rest of my cranberry juice or I’ll be stuck with the cup until we land. Chug it. Chug it!”
I downed the cranberry juice, and as I dropped the cup into the trash bag, I looked up and saw a question about Greek mythology pop onto the screen, a subject that Kara took a few classes on in college.

As I started to point up at the screen, she said, “It’s Bacchus,” while fiddling with her tray table. She had already seen the question, and she wasn’t even going to say that she knew the answer. What’s the point of knowing a trivia answer if you aren’t going to let everyone around you know that you know it? Modesty has no place in the trivial pursuits.

Did you know that the brown-throated three-toed sloth can reach Mike Todd online at mikectodd@gmail.com?

On physics and sausage

As my wife Kara and I were driving down I-95 recently, she pointed to a billboard and said, “Ooh, look! It’s only $89 to fly to the Bahamas!”

The number 89 had an asterisk next to it, of course. An asterisk is a symbol commonly used in advertising to tell the reader: “all of the words preceding this symbol are not true.” Sure enough, as we cruised past at seventy miles an hour, I caught the small print at the bottom of the billboard that said “each way.”

So while it was true that it cost only $89 to fly to the Bahamas, it also cost $89 to fly FROM the Bahamas. That’s still not a bad deal, but unless your game plan is to fly to the Bahamas to start a new life with only one checked bag, one carry-on and one personal item to your name, the price of your ticket will be much higher than the number on the billboard, which was tall enough to win a fight with the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.

Most airline fares are advertised one-way now, often with the condition that the one-way price is only offered when purchased as part of a round-trip ticket. This makes perfect sense, especially if the airlines are so concerned about our nation’s declining math skills that they’re making us multiply everything by two to help keep us sharp. While I appreciate the gesture, I don’t have the spare mental cycles to spend practicing my times tables while I’m driving. I’m too busy wondering about things like why my head feels like it’s going to implode when only one window is cracked open.

A few years ago, I started noticing that driving around with one window cracked open exactly replicated the feeling in my ears of being twelve feet underwater. I slept and drooled through most of my college physics classes, but I’m pretty sure that the effect has something to do with momentum, air pressure and hypochondria. I’ve never heard anyone else complain about this phenomenon, but I’m still pretty sure it’s real, like Global warming and the guy whose job it is to make sure that the Wizard of Id is never funny.

So while I’m not inclined to work out the math in my head, I do agree that only advertising half the price sure does make things look cheaper. Maybe the world would sell more stuff if everyone started doing that. Here’s how it would work at the veterinarian’s office:

“That will be $120 dollars, Mr. Johnson.”

“$120? But the sign out front says that you’d neuter my cat for $60.”

“Ah, yes. Did you see the asterisk?”

Anyway, my favorite sign along I-95, besides the South of the Border billboard with the giant hot dog on it that says, “You never sausage a place! You’re always a weiner with Pedro,” is the one between Philly and Baltimore that informs you of the Decoy Museum coming up at the next exit. What exactly should one expect to find at a Decoy Museum?

I picture a big empty parking lot with a wooden museum at one end. When you walk up to the front of the building, you see that the door is not a door at all, but a painting of a door. So you walk around the side of the building, where you find that the front of the museum is just a huge painted sheet of plywood propped up by 2x4’s. That’s when the rope snaps tight around your leg and flings you upside down, hanging you by the ankle from a nearby tree and shaking all the money out of your pockets.

Or maybe it’s just a museum full of wooden ducks. Either way, I’m not going there.

You can send Mike Todd half an email online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Driving the Mrs. crazy

Yesterday at work, I hit myself in the eyeball with a drinking straw. It was a souvenir Mickey Mouse bendy straw that a co-worker brought back from Obligatory Appeasement of the Children World, so it was a good deal beefier than your average disposable straw. I was bending the straw backwards and then releasing it, so that it would go “twaaaaannnng” like a miniature diving board. I greatly underestimated the kickback that Mickey was packing. He should really come with a warning label: “Don’t be an idiot around this drinking straw.”

Luckily, it was the soft curve of Mickey’s ear that bounced off my cornea, so there was no need to alert any medical professionals, which worked out well because I doubt there would have been an applicable check box on the worker’s comp form to describe what I had just done to myself.

Also, while I was mowing the lawn recently, a wood chip hit me right in the eye before I even had time to flinch. The frequency of things bouncing off my bare eyeballs is becoming somewhat alarming. A complete lack of reflexes in middle school might have done me some good, back in the Two for Flinching days. But now I’m worried that my eyelids’ slow response time is somehow age-related. I’m not twenty-five anymore, like I was three years ago.

Maybe I’m feeling sensitive about getting older because something very disturbing happened last weekend. My wife Kara and I went to a high school graduation party because we’re friends with – the horror, the horror! – the parents. We’re parents’ friends now. That’s going to take some getting used to. Seems like just a few days ago, we were the ones graduating from high school, so much smarter than we are now.

Regardless, I was fiddling with the Mickey straw yesterday because Kara wouldn’t let me leave work, and my enthusiasm for being productive had long ago expired. Kara and I carpool together in the mornings, so if one of us gets stuck at work in the evening, the other is held hostage as well. Fortunately, instant messaging technology lets the aggrieved party harass the productive person on the very computer screen upon which she is trying to get some work done.

I saved the chat we had yesterday around quitting time. Here’s how it went:

Me: You ‘bout ready to head home?

Kara: hey... doubt it... my job is crazy right now. I’ll get back to you in a few.

[Ten minutes pass.]

Me: Dude, it’s late! I have to be in early tomorrow. Should we just sleep here tonight?

Me: I gather from your silence that you do not share my desire to depart. I guess I’ll start making a blanket out of Post-it notes.

[Fifteen minutes pass.]

Me: I just injured my eyeball with a Mickey Mouse straw. Do we have any goggles lying around? I’m thinking of going with a James Worthy goggle kind of thing. Would be safer that way.

[Ten minutes pass.]

Me: I can’t remember what our house looks like. Do you think we’ll be able to find it?

[Ten minutes pass.]

Me: Losing...will...to...live...

Kara: OK OK! We can go now. Jeez.

Me: Hang on. I’m working on something -- be ready in an hour or so.

Kara puts up with the aggravation of carpooling with me for the same reason that rich people put up with having chauffeurs in their cars: I drive, and I don’t complain while the boss is around. We used to split the driving 50/50, but after we got married, whenever I tried to hand her the car keys, she acted like I was offering her a dead squirrel.

You can punch Mike Todd in the arm online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Freaky Frickin' Picture Wednesday

Last week, a local paranormal investigator was on the morning radio between Kelly Clarkson songs talking about winning a contest put on by the SciFi Channel. He apparently took the best picture of a ghost. I am refraining from putting double quotes around the words paranormal investigator and ghost, but I think we all see them there anyway.

Regardless, I find this stuff interesting enough to Google and steal from the internet, so here's the winning picture, taken at an old abandoned girls' college:

I think that's the ghost in the upper-left window. She looks a little curtain-y to me, but you can kinda make out a face. The legend is that she's still wandering the halls of the old girls' dorm, waiting for her roommate to come back and finally fill the damn Brita.

If you want to see the other ghost pics, the contest blog is here: http://ghostphotocontest.blogspot.com/. Make sure your Depends are tightly secured before clicking that link, especially if you become incontinent when looking at pictures of screen doors.

The jaws of summer

As my wife Kara and I headed deeper out into the ocean, I couldn’t help but scan the foamy brown water for any signs of creatures higher on the aquatic food chain than ourselves. I know that the odds say that my time would be better spent scanning the sky for any incoming meteors that might knock a winning lottery ticket out of my hand while a Nigerian prince is moving a large sum of money into the domestic checking account that I have graciously provided for him, but I still just can’t get comfortable when I’ve put myself in the position of potentially becoming reverse sushi.

Kara and I were swimming with my family off the Outer Banks of North Carolina, the place that received national media attention several years back for an unlikely string of shark attacks. This was back in the time when shark attacks were the most important thing for us to know about, mostly because Brad Pitt hadn’t gotten together with Angelina Jolie yet.

I couldn’t shake that uneasy feeling the whole time we were in the water, improbable as a shark attack may be. A fresh reminder of sharks’ presence in the area had washed up on shore earlier that day, about a mile down the beach from us, in the form of a nine-foot carcass. By the time I happened upon it -- “There’s a stinking, rotting shark carcass on the beach? Let’s go check it out!” -- all of its teeth had been removed. The following day, its head and tail had been sawed cleanly off. I never get any good souvenirs like dead shark heads. Mostly I just bring home sand in my body crevices. Here is how that gift-giving scene must have gone:

“Thanks for the shark head, Cletus! I’ll set it on the mantle by our wedding picture. Oh, you got the tail, too -- we’re gonna be eatin’ good tonight!”

Anyway, after we swam back to shore, my cousin-in-law Dave smiled and said, “I’m glad the sharks didn’t feel like Italian today.” It was nice to hear that I wasn’t the only one worried about becoming a razor-toothed creature’s meatball.

While we were there on vacation, I found that the Outer Banks is the perfect place to go if you’re looking to justify your SUV purchase. It’s the only place I’ve ever been to where I didn’t automatically think, “I guarantee that the person driving that thing is a jerk,” every time a Hummer H2 went by.

Many places in the Outer Banks simply don’t have access roads at all, and the only way to get to some spots is to drive down the beach in an SUV with slightly deflated tires, jumping over huge sandy ruts and splashing through small tidal pools, and occasionally running over small children’s sand castles. I’ve never seen a place in real life that looked more like an SUV commercial. None of these activities would have been possible riding in my wife’s Honda Civic, unless it was being dragged across the sand by a large tow truck or Barry Bonds.

The most important lesson I learned on vacation was this: Always tie your bathing suit on tight. I can’t think of a single situation in which this could ever be a bad idea. And as I found out the hard way, you never know when your three-year old cousin is going to mistake you for a maple tree and try to climb up you. He will do this by grabbing a fistful of your pants and pulling as hard as he can. Also, he will wait until you are holding a glass of water and standing in front of several family members, so that you only have one hand with which to attempt to recover your swimsuit and your dignity.

You can show Mike Todd how to tie a double knot online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Doggie doughnuts

The other day, I started my very first diet, completely by accident. A lot of people talk about how tough it is to start a diet, but I just developed a simple method that seems to work pretty well. The first step is to order the two cheeseburger extra value meal. When you sit down with your tray, if you notice that they’ve accidentally given you two hamburgers instead of two cheeseburgers, don’t get back up and complain. Just eat everything edible on your tray. Voila. Diet started, and finished. I completed this diet recently, and I feel healthier already. If they get your order right, though, you’ll have to start your diet some other day. You can also create an international variation to the diet if they forget to put sour cream on your tacos.

Sometimes I also diet by holding a slice of pepperoni pizza by the crust and letting the grease drip onto the plate. The more you let the grease drip, the healthier the pizza becomes. If you let the pizza drip for more than a minute, it’s the same as eating a rice cake.

I’m a much better dieter than the old golden retriever my family had when I was kid. Ginger, who had always been a pretty hefty dog, got enormous one summer. Corporate sponsors started trying to fly her over sports stadiums. People in wetsuits tried to surf on her in front of crowds, but Ginger wasn’t a big fan of the dead herrings.

Perplexed by her sudden weight gain, my parents tried everything to get the old dog out to exercise more. Then they started feeding her Science Diet. Then they continually cut back the portions, but nothing seemed to be working. Ginger just kept getting fatter.

My buddy Mark and I tried to help the situation by dressing Ginger up in Dad’s wristbands, Nike T-shirt and running shorts and putting a dog biscuit at the base of the treadmill, which was cranked up to jogging speed. Ginger would run along on the treadmill, trying desperately to grab the dog biscuit with her mouth. I’m not sure it did much for her fatness, but the “Gingercise” tape by the TV in the basement has provided entertainment for over a decade now.

One day, Dad decided to surreptitiously follow Ginger around on her wanderings. This was back in the days when dogs just roamed free around neighborhoods, without any high-voltage equipment strapped to their necks. We knew all the dogs in the neighborhood, and everyone knew ours. Dogs were like caribou, wandering the suburban plains. This was also, I believe, before carrying dog droppings around in one’s pocket became fashionable. Sometime around the mid-90s, plastic baggie manufacturers figured out a way to make carrying dog doo around a stylish thing to do. Nowadays, people can’t wait to get their hands on the stuff, which is probably why there hasn’t been a Ginger V2.0.

Anyway, Dad noticed that Ginger’s route always seemed to include going through the woods, up to the back neighbor’s house. When he followed her up there, he stood amazed as he watched Ginger walk up to a huge mound of doughnuts and scarf down three or four with each bite. Chocolate, glazed, powdered, jelly – for that entire summer, Ginger had been eating a buffet of doughnuts, in addition to her Science Diet.

The neighbor lady worked at Wawa, and every day, they had a pile of stale Dunkin’ Donuts to throw out. Rather than letting them go to waste, she’d bag them up and dump them in her backyard, because, for some reason, she wanted to feed Boston crèmes and frosted bear claws to the raccoons. Probably because they needed something to go with their double espressos.

You can follow Mike Todd around with a plastic baggie in your pocket online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

A man’s home is his hassle

A few years ago, when my wife Kara and I first started looking at houses with the insane intention of buying one, I remember the painful period of adjustment to the reality of how pathetically far a dollar goes in the real estate market. Back in the nineties, ten bucks would get you a matinee ticket, a large Coke and a two-bathroom Cape Cod. But that ship has sailed, leaving in its wake a housing market in which the only affordable houses are ones that have copious amounts of chicken wire and rusted staples holding things together.

When we first started looking, Kara would find houses for sale (but not on sale) on the internet, and we’d go track them down in the wild.

“It’s a little out of our price range, but let’s just look at it to get a feel for what things cost,” she’d tell me.

The first house we pulled up in front of looked like it might possibly have had severe fire damage. I looked back over to the printout on Kara’s lap and pointed at the asking price.

“Where’s the moat?” I asked.

“I don’t think this one has a moat,” she said. “Not on purpose, anyway.”

I said, “Anything that costs this much should have a moat. And a drawbridge. And it should probably include a neutered moat dragon that already has all of its shots.”

In the end, we managed to find a place for what seemed like a fair price, mostly because everything in the house was two months from breaking, leaking, exploding, imploding, fizzing out, burning up, or otherwise finding inventive ways to go kaput. The sturdiest thing in the house was the pink wallpaper, which clung to the drywall with such tenacity that we had to boil the entire house to remove it.

Until a couple of weeks ago, we thought that after almost three years of home ownership, we’d gotten all of the nasty surprises out of the way. But that was before we found out that towns pay people to send you letters telling you how awesome your house is. These people are called assessors. An assessor gives you a statement that tells you that your house could fund a medium-size NASA mission, not the kind where they have astronauts on board, but the kind where they shoot asparagus sprouts into space just to see what will happen, and that you will be taxed accordingly.

So last week we got to witness first-hand the bizarre spectacle of town grievance day, when the entire population descends on town hall to tell the assessment board that they live in a hovel. We also found out that the wheels of small town bureaucracy turn exactly as quickly as you’d expect them to. While we were waiting to see the assessment board, we actually graduated into a new demographic. One day, you’re crowd surfing at a Green Day concert, the next day you’re in town hall, sitting in a folding chair, scratching your belly, complaining to anyone who will listen about how they’re trying to run you out of town with these taxes.

We finally got the go-ahead to leave the waiting area and face our tormentors down in the dungeon of town hall. As we descended the stairs, we heard the lady in line ahead of us telling the assessment board in a sweet little voice, “The sewage plant is right next door. It always stinks. Our kids won’t even play in the yard.”

“Ooh, that’s a good one. We should use that,” I told Kara.

When our turn came, Kara told the assessor, “Our garage isn’t even attached to the house.”

“Attached garages are more of a fire hazard. You’re lucky to have a detached one,” the assessor said.

“Tell me that when it’s snowing,” Kara said.

“Our sewage stinks,” I interjected. That’s why Kara usually does the talking for us.

You can tell Mike Todd how bad he stinks online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Philling me in

About a month ago, an observant reader (we’ll call him Phil, because that’s his name) wrote: “Does Kara, that being your wife, Kara, receive a royalty every time you mention her name, Kara?”

I was shocked by Phil’s question because, up until that point, I was pretty sure that only my Mom read this column. But Phil raised an interesting point, to which I responded: “Phil, my wife's name is not Kara. I don't know what you're talking about. Oh, oh, wait, yeah, Kara, you're right. I remember now. Sorry. Yes, her name is Kara. And I just made another buck by saying Kara four more times.”

Then I went on about my business, wondering about things like how old people can remember during which year events occurred. “I saw the most beautiful sunset back in the summer of 1951. I’ll never forget it.” I have no idea what year things happened in. I was born in 1977 and graduated high school in 1996; college is a little fuzzier because I’m pretty sure it took me a really long time to graduate. So if something didn’t happen in either of 1977 or 1996, I have to bust out some serious math to figure out when it happened.

For an ice-breaker at work recently, we had to pick a coin out of our pockets and say something that happened in our lives during the year that the coin was minted. The dime in my pocket said 1992. After five minutes of working out the subtraction on a napkin, I figured that I’d been in eighth grade that year. The big milestone during my eighth grade year was the time after gym class that Kirk Mulligan almost stuck my head in the toilet. That sure was a proud moment for me. I say he “almost” stuck my head in the toilet because, just as he was pushing the back of my head towards the welcoming meniscus below, ‘ol Kirk took a ride on the Mike’s Knuckles Express. Just kidding. I think he started wailing on some other kid or something.

But that event precipitated me and my Dad enrolling in the Dragon Gym, where we took karate classes for three years and earned our black belts together, so I suppose I owe Kirk some measure of gratitude. Not every kid gets the chance to kick his dad in that most private of places: the basement, where we used to practice. I hadn’t thought about those karate classes in so long, it was nice of that dime to remind me. I’m pretty sure that the vast majority of people could still beat me up, but if I ever get attacked by a 12” x 12” pine board, I’m totally taking that thing out.

So I hadn’t put any more thought into mentioning Kara’s name in my column until yesterday, when I received this letter from a concerned reader (okay, it was Phil again): “Just noticed that the ‘Kara Kount’ in your last column is ZERO. Hope things are OK with you two.”

I appreciate Phil’s concern, but things are actually great with me and Kara right now, mainly because in her eyes, I have become cooler than Tom Cruise. This is not because of anything I have done, but Tom has been pretty busy for the past couple of years lowering the bar for the rest of us.

A preview for Mission: Impossible 3 came on TV the other night, and Kara said, “What happened to him? He’s not even cool anymore.”

I thought back to the old Top Gun poster that used to hang in her dorm room, of Tom Cruise as Maverick, sitting half-out of the cockpit, giving the thumbs up. Man, he used to be so cool.

“Requesting permission for flyby,” I’d say to Kara.

“That’s a negative, Ghost Rider. The pattern is full,” she’d reply, pushing me away.

Also, Phil, I mentioned your name eight times this week. I accept cash and home-cooked meals.

You can send Mike Todd an email or lose him forever at mikectodd@gmail.com.