Point-Counterpoint

Last week, after I posted the only angry letter to the editor I've ever received, an astute reader, whom we'll call "my mom," asked why I've never posted any of the nice ones I've gotten. I guess I was hoping someone would start a Mike Todd shrine and do that kind of stuff for me. Until I attract a stalker with some HTML skills, I suppose the dirty work is left to me:



Thanks to the astute reader whom we'll call "my dad" for scanning this and sending it to me.

This time I won't redact the letter writer's name. I hope Dick Goldberg of Chestnut Hill Googles himself and ends up here so that he can read what a cool dude I think he is. Dick, this is a little late in coming, but you're a cool dude. Thanks for being awesome.

The couple that tazes together, stays together

In our office building, the air conditioning has become so cold that several people have taken to turning on space heaters in their offices, pitting AC versus heater in an exhibition of inefficiency so profound that it makes me feel better about running an underground humidifier vs. dehumidifier fighting ring in my garage. Still, the scene is so wasteful that I’m pretty sure every time one of those space heaters is turned on, somewhere, a hippie loses a bongo.

I’ve also noticed a trend in which many stores are cranking up the AC with both front doors propped open, the idea being to pull in customers with the enticement of cold air, causing an effect similar to the one that happens to cartoon characters when they float on the scent of an apple pie cooling on a window sill. Perhaps customers should start boycotting stores that flagrantly waste energy like that, unless the store has something really cool on sale, which is usually when my personal boycotts break down. So far, the only store I’ve been able to successfully boycott is Talbot’s, except when I have to buy presents for my mom. In any event, it seems like cartoon characters could easily improve their apple pie retention ratios by just cooling their pies on their kitchen counters instead.

My wife Kara and I used to wage seasonal battles over the thermostat settings in our house, but since we moved into a place that came with central air last year, we can now hone our debate skills year-round. Kara likes to keep the AC at a level that would allow you to preserve an ice sculpture long enough to show it to your eventual children’s prom dates. In the winter, though, she prefers the house to double as a pizza oven.

We maintain a delicate peace through a sunshine policy; neither of us is allowed to change the temperature without announcing it to the other person. We adhere to this policy because we both know that noncompliance would touch off an escalation unlikely to end without tazers becoming somehow involved.

“It’s funny how our internal thermostats are different,” she said to me a couple of days ago, as I sat shivering under a down comforter, tucking my hands under my armpits and reciting state capitals to fight off the early stages of hypothermia. It just seems like maybe, in July, a person should occasionally be hot. When I was a kid, we just stayed in bed and sweated from June until September, spending our days waiting for the oscillating fan to come back our way. That was back when people appreciated needless suffering. These days, with people all comfortable inside their homes, offices and cars, the only chance we get to commune with nature happens in parking lots, which we don’t even appreciate because we’re too busy squeezing into the tiny spot beside the jerk who tried to take two spaces.

I have a certain level of eco-guilt that, coupled with my cheapness, always leads me to crank the temperature closer to whatever it happens to be outside. This guilt doesn’t extend to the car, though. I recently read an article that explained how rolling down the windows doesn’t necessarily increase fuel efficiency over running the AC, due to the increased drag of opening up your car. At low speeds, rolling the windows down is much better, but depending on the type of car you drive, the break-even point can be between 45 mph and 75 mph, above which it’s more efficient to run the AC. Personally, this is all moot, because the point at which hair you’ve placed carefully over your bald spots begins to dislodge when the windows are rolled down occurs at approximately 7 mph, eliminating this option entirely for any driving not taking place on the Jersey Turnpike.

You can give Mike Todd the artificially cooled shoulder at mikectodd@gmail.com.

I'm like Howard Stern without the naked ladies

In the 3+ years I've been writing this column, I've received nice words I didn't deserve from lots of nice people. I also got this one nasty letter to the editor back in April, which I'm finally putting down the PS3 controller long enough to post.

The letter refers to the column that I submitted to the paper as "Doggedly determined." The editor at the Chestnut Hill Local changed some text in that column from "Our dummies are numerous" to "Dummy Americans are as numerous as fat Americans," then he changed the title of the column to read, "Doggedly determined not to be a 'Dummy American.'" There were some other small changes, mostly attempting to make my writing comprehensible, but those were the two that set this guy off.

As you'll see in the letter, my column is called "Over the Top" in the Local, which is really a funny coincidence, because "Over the Top" with Sylvester Stallone happens to be my third-favorite arm wrestling movie of all time.





Who knew a column about puppies and bunnies would be so controversial?

For the record, I have nothing against Americans. Many of my best friends are Americans. I also I also have a soft spot (several, in fact) for fat people, and though I'd never consort with an actual fat person, I generally accept their friend requests on Facebook. I jest, of course. Nobody sends me friend requests.

I blacked out the good doctor's name 'cause I didn't want him to be able to get here by Googling himself, in case somebody mentioned his name in the comments. He's more than welcome to Google himself, among other things, but I just thought it would be better this way. Sorry to be all "Bush administration with a global warming report" about it.

Going to the vet, ordering the usual

Our puppy Memphis is turning the vet’s office into her own personal version of the old TV show “Cheers,” where she stars as perma-patron Norm Peterson.

“Memphis!” they say when she comes through the front door to the animal hospital, where everybody knows her name.

Back when we had a ferret, you could watch the summer Olympics take place in different cities between vet visits. Presidential administrations would come and go. Potholes would be fixed.

But with a puppy, you’re lucky if the milk in the fridge has time to go bad before she has to go back, or, in the case of our fridge, if the milk has time to go worse. The last time my parents came up to visit, I came downstairs in the morning to find my dad eating a bowl of cereal in the kitchen.

“Dad, did you smell the milk first?” I asked.

“Smell the milk?” he said.

“Are you crazy? You can’t just go drinking our milk all willy-nilly without checking it first,” I said, grabbing the carton and spinning it around to find the expiration date. On any given day, the average person is more likely to see a lunar eclipse than to find fresh milk in our fridge. Fortunately, Dad chose to play lactose roulette on the rare day in which the date hadn’t yet hit, though he might have been better off spending all that luck on a Powerball ticket.

Memphis precipitated our most recent vet visit a couple weeks ago by sprinting up our back steps, losing her traction and slamming into one of the steps with her hip. Though it obviously hurt quite a bit, she didn’t cry out at all, which reminded me of the time, when we were twelve, that my buddy Johnny broke a wooden shovel handle using nothing but the sheer force of gravity and his crotch, two things that, if the story is about you, you never want to hear described in the same sentence.

Since we had zero carpentry skills and weren’t allowed to use power tools (a restriction that should probably still be in effect), we’d decided to dig ourselves a fort in the woods. While the early fort designs called for a trapdoor with which to catch various siblings, we primarily wanted a space in which we could sit around and eat Cheerios from a thermos. We didn’t even like Cheerios that much, but once the idea took hold, we just couldn’t shake it. When you’re an adult, the same kind of impulse usually results in the purchase of a motorboat.

Eventually, the hole got so deep that we’d stand on the edge and jump down about four feet onto the head of the shovel, driving it through knots of roots. It was one of these ill-placed jumps that sent Johnny’s crotch on a collision course with the shovel handle. The handle snapped with a loud crack, but Johnny just laid there quietly in the hole, having accomplished what is still the most impressive feat of human endurance I’ve ever personally witnessed, though at the time I wondered if it might have been easier for Johnny if I started using the broken shovel to just cover him up.

The vet told us that Memphis had slightly displaced her hip, and that we’d need to keep her in the crate at home for a week, maybe two.

My wife Kara handles bad news much better than I do; she goes the logical route straight to acceptance, while I prefer to hang around in the denial phase for a while.

“Nope. We’re not doing that. No way,” I said after the vet left the room, picturing Memphis in her crate, banging a tin cup against the bars. After discussing with Kara, we agreed to do the best thing for the dog, and now her recovery is coming along quite nicely. Memphis even seems to like hanging out in the crate, which is either due to the puppy Valium or the fact that her crate is bigger than my first dorm room.

You can sedate Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

You can check out any time you like……

Last weekend, my wife Kara and I invented an awesome, real life brain teaser. If you’d like to play along at home and test your own cerebral power, you can set up our brain teaser for yourself in just a few short, unintelligent steps.

First, check into a hotel room that adjoins the room where your sister-in-law Sarah and her boyfriend Brad are staying. Watch a few minutes of CSI: Miami before you go to sleep, but turn it off when you realize that you’ve already seen that one, even though you’ve only watched that show like three times.

The next morning, while still inside your room, go to the front door and swing the locking mechanism, which is called a “swing bar door guard” for those who never needed a name for it, which includes most non-idiots, to the locked position. The swing bar door guard is the thing you flip over to keep your hotel door open while you run to the ice machine in your underwear, at which point the elevator doors will open and a high school marching band will come out.

Now all you need to do is exit the hotel through Brad and Sarah’s room so that you can steal some of their Swedish fish on the way out. Make sure that the knobless door between your rooms, the one that can only be opened from inside your room, swings shut and locks behind you.

You’re all set. Of course, if you’ve replicated the brain teaser this far, you’ve already failed it. And if you’re anything like me and Kara, you’ll wander back to your hotel room at 1:30 in the morning, intoxicated somewhat on life but mostly on summer ale, and hit your forehead on the door when it only swings open the two inches that the swing bar door guard will allow.

At this point, you can wake up Brad and Sarah all you want, but they won’t be able to do anything but ask where all the Swedish fish went.

When this happened to us last Saturday, we stood outside the door to our room, picturing future travelers checking into the same hotel.

“Hello, I’d like to stay in Room 214, if it’s available.”

“Oh, we haven’t let folks stay in that room for nearly fifty years.”

“Why? Because it’s haunted?”

“No, because some idiot locked the swing bar door guard and left through the adjoining room. If you can figure out a way to open that door, you can have his luggage. And his wife’s, too.”

Earlier this year, our cousins had the exact same thing happen, except instead of locking up just their razors and iPods, their two-year-old daughter was on the other side of the door.

“Sophie, bring a chair over to the door, stand on it and flip the swingy thing on the door over to the other side,” they called into the room.

“Hi, Mommy!” Sophie replied. Several minutes later, the hotel staff had taken the door off its hinges.

“I have a predicament,” I told the lady at the front desk, who shook her head as I explained.

She handed me a plastic trash bag and said, “Well, you’re not the first. There’s a way to open it with a trash bag, but I’ve never done it. I’ll send up a security guard.”

Franklin, the security guard, hadn’t done it before, either, but he sure got a kick out of trying.

“This is a new one,” he said, laughing to himself as he reached through the crack in the door with the trash bag.

After thirty rustley minutes of trying every possible trash bag configuration while Kara offered suggestions that started with “Ooh, ooh, try this,” Franklin finally gave the bag a tug that sent the door guard swinging to the unlocked position, setting off a series of high fives that only ended once we realized that we were at the wrong room. I’m kidding, of course. They were more like handshakes than high fives.

You can unhinge Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Oak trees make great employees

My buddy Josh, looking to change gears and companies, just had a job interview in which he was asked, “If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?”

If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t know what kind of tree you’d be, then you obviously have no business developing web pages for a small company.

Josh replied, “That’s an easy one. Oak tree, definitely.”

“What makes you say that?” the interviewer asked.

“I wanted to give you an answer quickly,” Josh replied.

Off-the-wall interview questions are, as Howard Hughes would say, the wave of the future. On the first recruiting trip I ever attended for my company, during which I discovered how much easier it is to breathe on the other side of the table, an experienced interviewer let me watch her work. Every one of her interviews began like this: “Repeat after me: silk, silk, silk.”

The interviewees, expecting to talk about their qualifications, would hesitantly say, “Silk, silk, silk.”

Then the interviewer would ask, “What does a cow drink?”

At this point, the interviewees would invariably say “milk.” One person in ten would say the right answer: water. I said “milk” the first time I was asked, but I’m generally inclined to stick by that answer even though it’s clearly wrong, which probably means I should run for higher office. Baby cows drink milk, dang it. Some may argue that a baby cow is called a calf, not a cow, but I can’t hear them because I’m sticking my fingers in my ears and going, “LA LA LA!”

Besides, if I was giving the interview, the real answer wouldn’t be water or milk, it would be “What does a cow drink?” because Simon never said to stop repeating. Hopefully, I would be interviewing somebody to be a third grader.

Josh did well enough on his interview that the company started calling all of his references, which, unfortunately for Josh, included me.

“What are his greatest strengths?” the caller asked. When you’re trying to stick up for your friend on this kind of a call, they expect you to lie, so even though you want to say that in college, when you tagged along to watch Josh get his nipple pierced, and he sat there in the chair cracking jokes with the person who was about to inflict enough pain on him to make passing a kidney stone seem like a pleasant way to spend the afternoon, you were very impressed with how strong he was, even though a month later his mom would cry and make him take it out, you should still just say that he’s a great team player.

“What are his greatest weaknesses?” she asked next.

“Booze and women,” I replied. Just kidding, of course. This question was tricky, because you can’t list an actual weakness, but you have to say something.

“He’s kinda short,” I said, which was the best answer I gave during the whole call because that’s only a weakness if he was interviewing for the NBA or for a job where he’d be expected to get the Saran Wrap out of the cabinet over the fridge.

I was hoping she’d asked me a wacky question, like, “In your personal opinion, does a dog have four knees or two knees and two elbows?” but she stuck to the boring script instead. I guess if you’re not interviewing for the job and just trying to help out your friend, they don’t care how many quarters you think you’d have to stack end-on-end to reach the moon.

Anyway, Josh called yesterday to say that he’d gotten the job, probably because the other guy said he’d be a sassafras tree.

You can shoot a rubber band into Mike Todd’s cubicle at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Raising a puppy, a toddler and Cain

Last weekend, puppy and toddler came together in our house, creating a swirling vortex of electricity that made the adults’ hair stand on end and popped circuit breakers in the next county. You may have seen the trail of flames crisscrossing our yard like we’d been turfed by the Delorean from Back to the Future.

The tumult began when my wife’s cousin Richard and his wife Norma brought their daughter Ruby over for a family cookout. As soon as Ruby met our puppy Memphis, the two of them became inseparable, joined primarily by way of Memphis’ tongue. Children are naturally drawn to puppies, and puppies quickly understand that kids are highly likely to drop any food they may have. The pair of them tore about the house in a Tasmanian Devil-like tornado; occasionally, you could see a paw or a tiny pink Croc sticking out as the tornado sucked up everything in its path, including dog toys, remote controls and digital cameras.

Of course, the tornado didn’t actually destroy anything, and in truth, the magnitude of its cuteness was such that if you stared at it for too long, you turned into a Hello Kitty lunchbox.

My wife Kara and I were thrilled to have Richard and Norma’s family over for many reasons, the very least of which being that we finally had to give the house a good cleaning. Without impending visits from houseguests, entropy exacts a heavy toll on our immediate surroundings. Shortly before their arrival, our patio table had enough pollen caked onto it to fuel a Clarinex clinical trial. A visit from a local friend barely warrants removal of underwear from the living room floor, but family visits, especially first-time family visits, get the full treatment, including dusting off the credenza and the vacuum cleaner.

As we watched Memphis following Ruby from room to room, Richard said, “I think in some ways, raising a puppy could be harder than raising a baby.”

I’m pretty sure he was just trying to make us feel good, but raising a puppy has to be better practice for parenthood than those sacks of flour we carried around in health class in the sixth grade. For a week, each of us had to carry around a sack of flour as if it was our baby, and we failed the assignment if we got caught putting it in our locker, leaving it unattended or making pancakes out of it. I’d like to think I did a good job of raising my sack of flour, and that maybe it has since settled down, met a nice sack of sugar and is off raising its own little packets somewhere.

Ruby’s favorite discovery was Memphis’ crate, which she immediately made into her own fort, creating the photo op of the day with Ruby and Memphis inside the crate, like one of those Wild West prison photos.

The brand name of the crate was “Petmate,” but the scene got me to thinking: “Where’s the ‘Kidmate’ version?” Harried parents could enjoy a nice worry-free night out, knowing that their children were safely crated at home. It might sound unworkable, but a cage is really just a crib that’s been upgraded to have a roof.

By the end of the afternoon, the adults all watched intently to see whether the puppy or the toddler would run out of energy first. Toddlers and puppies both function like Rogue from the X-Men, gaining power by sapping it from others. Lucky for all of us, Ruby and Memphis were sapping it from each other that day. By mid-afternoon, with Memphis passed out on the kitchen floor and Ruby giggling after squeezing her Freezy Pop so hard that the flavored ice shot over her shoulder, we had our answer: toddlers rule and puppies drool, though they both do a bit of each.

You can let Mike Todd out of his crate at mikectodd@gmail.com.

The Dulles airport of all

Sometimes, when I’m wandering around airports, I get the sinking feeling that no matter how much good I’m able to do in my life, or at least the parts of my life that are left over after running over pedestrians and extorting shop owners in Grand Theft Auto IV on the PlayStation 3, I will never even come close to matching the accomplishments of the person who first thought to take a piece of luggage and attach little wheels to it. I hope that person got a big raise, along with the people who invented EZ-Pass and pepperoni, respectively.

I had plenty of time to think about these kinds of things in my hotel room during my short, accidental vacation last week to Washington, D.C, Home of the Connection That Doesn’t Connect, And Also Several Phallic Monuments. After foolishly booking a connection on the last flight of the day to Raleigh-Durham through D.C., I found myself stranded at Dulles Airport, the most beautiful and state-of-the-art airport within a 500-yard radius of itself.

As the man at the ticket counter mashed buttons on what looked to be a keyboard with no corresponding screen, I wondered if he was going to force me to be Mr. Irate Customer Man. I hate being Mr. Irate Customer Man. When the occasion calls for it, my wife Kara makes a terrific Mrs. Irate Customer Woman, getting all sorts of discounts and refunds that we never would have received if she wasn’t willing to hulk out every now and again. But this time I was on my own, alone in a long line of distressed travelers for whom a connecting flight had been the most recent broken promise to come out of our nation’s capital.

As the ticket agent’s fingers continued tapping, a printer under the counter shot out a couple of “Get Out of the Airport Free” cards. The tapping continued with one hand as the man wordlessly slid vouchers for a free hotel and shuttle across the counter, and with a wave of his finger he performed the trick of making me disappear. Without Kara there to negotiate, turn green and fling trash cans around the terminal, I figured I’d be lucky to walk away with a voucher for a free frosty at Wendy’s. Hulk happy.

There’s a certain freedom that comes with staying in a hotel room while your luggage remains stranded in the nether regions of the transportation system. Brush your teeth? Can’t. What to wear tomorrow? Exactly the same thing as today. It’s like being eleven again.

Back at the airport with the same clothes and much different breath the next day, I noticed for the first time that the security lines asked you to pick a category that best described you: casual traveler or expert. While I usually arrive at my destination at the same time as everyone else on the plane, I wasn’t sure whether that qualified me for the black diamond security trail. How do you gain the confidence to label yourself an expert traveler? I guess, to practice at home, you could wedge yourself between the toilet and the tub and have someone jam a serving tray into your knees.

I decided not to hot dog and stepped into the novice line. As it turned out, both lines ended up at the same place, though there were a couple of people in the expert line who looked intermediate at best.

When I got to the front of the line, the security attendant informed me that my airline, possibly because of my hygienic state, had chosen me for extra security screening. That sounded scary at first, evoking images of windowless rooms and latex gloves. But really, the only difference is that you get your own private escort through the X-Ray machine and then they give you a little massage afterwards as a reward. If you ever get a chance to take the extra screening, you should treat yourself. Just book the last flight out of D.C. and you’ll be on your way. Sort of.

You can request an aisle seat at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Free fallin’ in Philly

When I was twelve years old, some family friends (the Nevilles, to give credit where it’s due) gave me a tape for Christmas that contained the first music that ever really spoke to me, and when it spoke, it said, “This is what you’re going to listen to from here on out. You can throw away your Milli Vanilli tapes now.”

The tape was Tom Petty’s “Full Moon Fever,” and while it might be too much to label its acquisition as a life-changing event, getting that tape did enable me for the first time to have my own decent music without raiding my older sister Amy’s tape collection. Amy had a big-time salary from scooping ice cream at Friendly’s, so she could afford to fill her wall-mounted tape organizer, which would probably today qualify as an exhibit at the Smithsonian, with all the John Cougar Mellencamp and Beastie Boys albums she could get her sprinkle-covered (or jimmy-covered, if you must) hands on. Up until the Nevilles passed “Full Moon Fever” on to me, I had been a musical tapeworm, waiting for my host to try something new so that I could grab a little piece of it for myself.

So when my friends announced that they’d gotten extra tickets to the Tom Petty show at the Wachovia Center a couple weeks ago, my wife Kara and I jumped at the chance to go, even though the tickets cost enough that we could have purchased two barrels of oil or Bear Stearns instead.

To me, the coolest thing about a Tom Petty concert is the mix of people who show up; high school kids are represented in equal numbers with folks who can pull money out of their 401(k)s without penalty. Tom Petty himself will start collecting Social Security soon. I hope he buys himself something nice. In any event, it’s great to see a man who’s been cranking out albums for longer than Microsoft has been cranking out blue screens of death attracting a crowd full of kids who look like they should probably be home trading Pokémon cards.

The younger people in the crowd at the Wachovia Center could have learned a lot about concert-going by paying attention to the older folks, the seasoned veterans of getting the highest level of enjoyment out of such an event. For instance, a man in his fifties in the row directly behind me taught those around him an important lesson about how not to have your concert experience cut down in its prime. When a security guard confronts you during the show, shining a flashlight in your face and telling you to come with him, do NOT, under any circumstances, stop playing air guitar. I watched this guy repel security guards by wailing away on his invisible guitar for a solid fifteen minutes. It took them that long to figure out how to penetrate his force field of sheer awesomeness.

The younger folks also had a few tricks in their pockets. Did you know that etiquette now calls for holding up a lighted cell phone instead of a lighter when requesting an encore? Then if the request is denied, everyone can just listen to whoever has the best ringtone.

As always, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers put in a solid performance for the screaming audience, playing songs old and new to a crowd that seemed utterly oblivious to the fact that it wasn’t yet the weekend. And while many of his songs are older than the fans who love them, somehow, the aging process doesn’t appear to be affecting Tom Petty at all. He looks exactly the same now as he did fifteen years ago. At least from a hundred and fifty yards, he does. Meanwhile, Keith Richards looks like he’s been through whatever process they use on beef jerky.

You can send your email into the great wide open at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Moving couches, stealing babies

When you have kids, besides signing up for a lifetime of being a caregiver, mentor and science-fair-project-completer, you also, as a reward for surviving their teens, get to carry their couches every year from one apartment to another. Your kids won’t have their own couches, though, so you’ll actually just be picking up the couches that used to be yours and lugging them to an apartment where the shower rod falls down when you turn on the fan.

My parents probably thought they’d gotten out of the business of moving my stuff around the country many years ago, but last weekend they started the enterprise up again, driving nearly four hours each way to deliver their pre-owned couches to our house. They did this because, besides being exceptionally generous people who pass along only the finest of furniture and genes, they saw the state of our previous couch, which was of course also their previous couch, and which had served for many years as a ferret burrow for our late varmint Chopper, making it rattier than a scratching post and holier than the Pope.

So when my folks ordered their own new couches, they volunteered to rent a trailer and bring their old couches up to us. Incidentally, did you know that U-Haul won’t let you hitch one of their trailers to a Ford Explorer? You’ll probably never need to know that, but you also don’t need to know what Tom Cruise’s baby’s name is, which makes it even worse that little Suri Cruise now occupies the shelf space in your brain where the quadratic equation used to be.

My wife Kara recently became a bit of an expert on hauling things herself. Before going to her cousin’s wedding a couple of weeks ago, Kara decided that we should go purse shopping, which is my favorite thing to do when I can’t find a grease trap to clean out.

“Ooh, what do you think about this one?” Kara said, holding up a large black bag with buckles or something on it. I can’t really say for sure what it looked like because I was staring off over the racks, wondering which video games my single friends were playing. There’s only so much purse shopping a man can be expected to handle. It’s like looking through someone’s photo album when you know there aren’t any pictures of you. One can only stay engaged for so long.

“You don’t like it?” she asked.

“Oh, no. It looks like it could hold stuff,” I said.

She ended up purchasing a purse so big that our friend Anna dubbed it a “baby-stealing bag.” The theory was that Kara could put her wedding flip-flops in the purse to carry around until the reception. Apparently, the shoes that women wear to wedding services are just the starting pitchers. They have a whole lineup of middle relief that they call in after the reception begins.

As we drove to the wedding with Kara’s family, she set her new purse in her lap.

“Oh, can I put these in there?” her sister Jill asked, holding up her own flip flops. Her other sister Sarah and her mom looked at the bag and their eyes grew bigger. Pretty soon, every female member of Kara’s family began producing flip-flops that had been hidden in jackets and, presumably, ankle holsters and throwing them into Kara’s bag. By the time we got there, Kara looked like she had enough provisions in her bag for a through hike of the Appalachian Trail. At least she had comfy couches to rest on once we got home.

You can hitch your email to Mike Todd’s inbox at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Can’t teach a new dog new tricks, either

My wife Kara finally got me to go to obedience school, but fortunately while we were there most of her attention was directed towards our new puppy Memphis.

I pictured obedience school as a big Chuck E. Cheese for dogs, where pooches frolic about and someone else teaches them to behave while you sit at the table, eating pizza and dispensing tokens. In reality, the dogs weren’t allowed anywhere near each other, and Kara and I were tasked with controlling what the teacher described as our “perpetual motion machine,” an animal so excited that any number of rabid wolverines would have been easier to teach to “leave it.”

The chairs in the room had been organized into pods, with room only for one dog per pod, along with its servants. Memphis whimpered and pranced, straining at her mangled, half-eaten leash, backing up and launching herself towards every other pod in rapid succession. I quickly downgraded my definition of success from leaving with an obedient dog to leaving with more than half a leash.

The dog in the next pod over glared at Memphis under the chairs, barking and baring its teeth. This was the dog that wanted to beat the other dogs up and take all their lunch money.

“Hey! A new friend!” Memphis thought, attempting a blast-off to go say hello.

A few weeks ago, when my sister’s otherwise very sweet cat tried to attack Memphis through a sliding glass door that was, thankfully, closed, Memphis wagged her tail as the cat hissed and slashed at the glass.

Excited, Memphis looked up at me as if to say, “Hey! A new friend!”

We’d had Memphis for nearly a month before we were able to take her off of house arrest. Until the endless series of puppy shots had been pumped into her, the three of us were under vet’s orders to stay cooped up, our house serving as one large doggy crate. That’s why puppies always seem so cute: the supply of them out in the open is artificially limited. It’s the same way diamonds stay expensive.

Having a dog that you can’t take off your property is like having a computer that has no internet. You can only keep yourself occupied with Spider Solitaire for so long. With the dog bouncing off of various household surfaces, I decided to break the rules, just a little, and walk her a few houses up the street.

One hundred feet into our adventure, a little Swiffer Wet Jet of a dog bolted out of the bushes, pausing in its yapping just long enough to attempt to nip Memphis on her tail. As I shooed the dog away and lamented my lack of chemical irritants with which to spray it, I looked down at Memphis, worried that she had just been permanently emotionally scarred.

She was wagging her tail in the direction of her assailant and looking at me as if to say, “Dude, my new friend has a bit of a temper.”

She seems to carry this attitude with her everywhere she goes, including when the head obedience instructor led her to the middle of the room to demonstrate, well, I’m not sure exactly what she had intended to demonstrate, but if it was futility, she picked the right dog.

With the instructor standing on the leash and snapping her fingers to get our dog’s attention, Memphis wagged her entire body, whipping her head from side to side as she tried to decide which new friend might enjoy a frantic and slobbery visit. In some areas of the world, decades are spent mastering a state of mind that allows one to pay attention to everything at nothing at once, a goal Memphis had achieved entirely by accident. Now if we could only get our little Zen master to lie down.

You can be Mike Todd’s new friend at mikectodd@gmail.com.