I’m a luger, baby

My wife Kara and I were both greatly not-at-all anticipating the start of the Winter Olympics this year. We just don’t catch Biathlon Fever like the Norwegians do, although we hear that Avian Biathlon Fever might be pretty big soon.

Regardless, we’ve found ourselves oddly drawn to the hodgepodge of eclectic sports that make up the Winter Games. It’s actually kind of fun to watch the events at the end of the day, pretending that the whole world hasn’t known the results for several hours, and trying to forget that we already heard the winners announced on the radio during the drive home. It’s entertainment enough just to watch Bob Costas drag out every event until the three minutes before the 11:00 news comes on.

The other night, Kara flicked on the TV and said, “Oh, look, figure skating’s on!” She said this with genuine enthusiasm, the same way I might say, “The doctor said I’m not allowed to shovel snow anymore! Here, let me show you where we keep the shovels.”

But her enthusiasm faded quickly. “Wait, never mind. It’s just ice dancing,” she announced.
We were soon to find out that ice dancing is just like figure skating, but with all the exciting parts removed -- nary a triple salchow to be found. If we were taking the SATs right now, we might even say figure skating : ice dancing :: kinda cool : pretty lame.

After a few minutes of watching the compulsory dance, in which every pair of skaters performed the exact same dance to the exact same music, Kara said, “It’s like watching the Nutcracker, but boring.” Actually, they should spice up ice dancing by having the skaters perform while wearing huge Nutcracker or Buzz Lightyear costumes; this would also help the skaters practice up for their post-Olympic Ice Capade careers.

We did finally realize why the ice dancing competition was getting so much air time, though: the female skater on the American team was really, really hot.

“Wow, she’s really hot.” Kara said. Then she turned to me and asked, “Isn’t she?”

Sensing a trap, I replied, “You’re hotter.”

Then I looked over at Kara. She had just applied what she calls a “deep-pore cleansing mask” to her face, which sounds like fancy stuff, but to me is indistinguishable from spackle. She looked like, and I mean this in the most flattering way possible, a damaged wall that Bob Vila has just prepped for a coat of Dry-Lock. Or maybe a little bit like Skeletor from the old He-Man cartoons.

“Well, maybe you’re not hotter right this second,” I clarified, “but usually you are.” With that comment, I dropped out of medal contention altogether.

What’s most striking about the Olympics is the staggering number of commercials. The Olympic coverage seems to cut to commercial about every three minutes, at which time the TV volume magically cranks up so loud that pictures start falling off the wall.

“These commercials sure are loud!” Kara yelled to me, pinned sideways to the wall by the amplitude of the sound waves.

“What? I can’t hear you!” I replied, the Visa commercial making my face ripple like James Bond’s when he was stuck in the G-force simulator.

If they want more people to watch those ads, they don’t need to crank up the volume. They just need to add some quality new events, like Olympic Snowball Fight. That would be awesome.

Perhaps they haven’t done it because Olympic Snowball Fight would probably end the same way every other snowball fight ends; somebody would make a watermelon-sized snowboulder and drop it on somebody else’s head, and then Olympic Snowball Fight would turn into Olympic Regular Fight. Still, that would be fun to watch, too.

You can do a synchronized triple axle/double toe loop with Mike Todd online at cox1013@hotmail.com.

It's Occasional Picture Wednesday!

With half an hour left before another Wednesday gets away, here's another Hofer picture:



Also, you should probably click on this.

Definitely not highbrow

My wife Kara has taught me so many things that I never would have figured out on my own. For instance, without her, I would still be sleepwalking my way through life, having absolutely no idea that eyebrow mousse even exists.

She enlightened me on our most recent trip to CVS – a store which, incidentally, will give you a free box of tampons or a bottle of Snapple if you can tell the cashier what the letters CVS stand for. Hint: not Clarinex’s Very ‘Spensive.

Kara walked right up to a lady who was stocking the shelves and said, “Excuse me, do you know if you carry brow mousse here?”

I admired her courage for doing that. Even if I could think of an earthly use for eyebrow mousse, and I wanted it more than I want everyone in a non-construction-related-industry who drives a Hummer H2 to develop at least a mild case of hemorrhoids, I’m pretty sure I’d give up if I couldn’t find it on my own.

“What’s that?” the lady asked.

“Um, eyebrow mousse. Like hair mousse, but for eyebrows,” Kara said, helpfully pointing to her brow region.

The lady stared at Kara, giving her the same look that my family gave Cousin Gene about fifteen years ago when he officially became the first person we’d ever heard utter the phrase “chill out.” We all stared at Gene, trying to figure out if we’d heard him correctly.

“Gene, that is absolutely the stupidest expression I have ever heard,” his sister Sherry said.

Though I agreed at the time, the phrase has still managed to work its way into my daily vocabulary. It’s just such a useful expression, perfect for the times when you’re driving along with your wife, and you discover, wedged between the seat and the emergency brake, an envelope that she asked you to drop in the mailbox three weeks ago.

The CVS lady called her manager over, who had not only heard of eyebrow mousse, but offered the friendly advice that, “Clear mascara does the trick just as well, and it sells for two bucks less.”

The fact that it is totally free to lick your finger and run it across your eyebrows didn’t occur to anyone there but me. Besides, the manager’s advice came highly recommended by her immaculate eyebrows.

“Oh, really? The brow mousse reviews I read online didn’t mention the clear mascara thing,” Kara said, which just goes to prove that there is absolutely nothing that can’t be found on the internet, except for a girl who wants to date my buddy Hambone.

So Kara bought the clear mascara, and we headed out to search for her car in the parking lot. Most of the year her car is black, but it spends the winters coated in a crunchy, salty shell, so it blends in perfectly against the snow banks.

Whenever the car gets this dirty, I’m reminded of a conversation I had with my buddy Johnny when we were home over Christmas.

“When’s the last time you washed your car?” he asked me.

I thought about it for a minute. “The senior prom,” I said. “Good ol’ class of ’96. How about you?”

“I never have,” he said.

“You didn’t even wash it for the prom?” I asked.

“Nope. I’ve never washed a car in my life,” he said proudly. “Rain gets the job done pretty well for free.”

The salt on Kara’s car suggests otherwise. I’m considering parking it in my parents’ rhododendron so the deer will come lick it clean.

Also, you may want to double-check my math here, but I’m pretty sure that graduating high school in ’96 means that my ten-year high school reunion is coming up later this year. That thing better hurry up and happen so I can go bald already.

You can chill out with Mike Todd online at cox1013@hotmail.com.

Take it to the bank

At long last, my wife Kara and I finally decided to take that momentous step that all of our parents took so many years ago, the one that’s going to alter our lives from here on out, binding us in an unbreakable, eternal bond to the thing that we have created together. Yes, we’ve combined our bank accounts.

We decided to say “I do (authorize this person as a joint owner of this account)” after going out to our favorite Mexican place for dinner recently. The food there is so good that if I was Scrooge McDuck, I’d fill up the silo in my backyard with their salsa and swim around in it all day long.

Kara gets the shrimp burrito every time, and I always get the Oaxacan tacos. As I found out from the waitress who laughed at my inaugural attempt to pronounce the word, Oaxacan is pronounced like wa-HOCK-en, which to me sounds less like a place in Mexico and more like a sound a ninja makes when kicking someone in the face.

When the check came at the end of the meal, we both pretended not to see it, like we do with our ferret’s accidents in the living room, because the first one to acknowledge it has to do something about it. Eventually, I pointed at the check and said, “The waiter did an accident on our table. Who’s going to clean it up?”

When it comes time to decide who’s paying for dinner, Kara and I raise our fists above the table and settle things like adults. Here’s what it sounds like when adults settle things: “One, two, three, shoot…Ha! Paper beats rock.” One-potato-two-potato-three-potato-four is how kids settle arguments; rock, paper, scissors appeals to our refined adult sensibilities. She manages to beat me about 80% of the time – either I’m telegraphing my moves or she’s poked a hole in my “always rock” strategy.

Of course, a married couple shouldn’t even need to discuss who pays for what; we’re all playing for the same team. So we decided to go ahead and mash all of our accounts together. This is likely to benefit me the most, as I could use assistance with my financial management skills.
“Would you quit leaving wadded-up dollar bills all over the house?” she says to me. “One of these days I’m going to collect them all and go buy a Sex and the City DVD set.”

“But my little piles of change need company,” I reply. Leaving random nests of money strewn about the house turns every day into an Easter egg hunt.

“Why are you such a slob? Just stop leaving money all over the house.”

“Hey, when we got married, how many people did we become?” I ask. This is my favorite card to play when we’re fighting, because it makes her responsible for anything stupid that I’ve done.
She sizes me up. “Two.”

I look hurt. “How many?”

“One,” she says.

“That’s better,” I reply.

Then she says, “One person with a clean half and a slobby half.”

And of course she’s right, but I’m not the only one in the house with money issues. As we were about to go to sleep the other night, I looked over to see our ferret on the floor, skillfully making both a chew toy and a scratching post out of Kara’s leather purse. She glanced over at him gnawing on it, then went back to reading her book.

“Doesn’t it bother you that Chopper is eating your purse?” I asked.

“No, not really. I don’t use that one anymore.”

I remembered standing beside my wife as she purchased that purse less than a year before, and shedding a single tear when I saw the total on the register. I shouldn’t have been concerned at the price, though; that purse matches Chopper’s coat perfectly.

You can wad Mike Todd up and leave him on your coffee table online at cox1013@hotmail.com.

Truly sophomoric

An English professor at Penn State, who had written a few novels and several freelance magazine articles, told our class that for every seventy-five pages a person writes, there will probably be about one page worth keeping. Since I’ve been writing this column every week for a year now, I hope to hit upon that page sometime in the next twenty-three weeks or so.

With today’s edition of the newspaper, I’ve reached my goal of keeping “Just humor me” going for one whole year. True, if this column was a human, it wouldn’t even be eating solid foods yet. Or maybe it would. I don’t know. The point is, don’t leave your baby with me.

One year might not sound like such a long time to most people, but I had serious doubts coming into this that the column was going to survive for that long, mostly because I knew that I didn’t have fifty-two things to say. To illustrate, here is a list of the thoughts I have in an average day:

1. I’m tired.
2. I’m hungry.
3. I’m tired again.

Also, sometimes I think about how it would be a lot easier to be a vegetarian if more plants were made out of pepperoni. Not that I’ve ever tried to be a vegetarian. I wouldn’t last two days – my wife Kara calls me a “chlorophobe” because vegetables scare me, unless they’re fried and on a cheesesteak. But I have the utmost respect for vegetarians, except for the ones who eat chicken and fish and still insist on being called vegetarians, because trout isn’t a vegetable. Tilapia sounds like maybe it should be, but that still doesn’t count.

Anyway, I’ve found that it is quite possible to fill up this little part of the newspaper page week after week without actually saying anything at all. The trick of writing a newspaper column is to develop a strict regimen of doing something stupid each and every week. This is called “research.”

Last week, my wife Kara and I met up over our lunch breaks, and we ran to the Post Office to mail a package to our friends who just had a baby. To our amazement, there was nobody in line. A lunch-break Post Office with nobody in line is the holy grail of errand-running.

We quickly assembled the priority mail box, stuffed all the little baby presents into it and sealed it up, expecting a stampede through the door at any moment.

“What’s their address?” Kara asked, pen in hand.

“Dude, they live in like, Connecticut, right?” I said. She slumped over the box.

“You didn’t bring the address?”

“Baby, I’m researching,” I said.

Also, if you write a humor column, you can deduct from your taxes any expenses incurred while doing something stupid, because if you write about it later, that makes it a work-related expense. This helps ease the pain of your patio umbrella snapping in half because you left it open during a blizzard. So I hear, anyway.
I’ve also learned that it’s a columnist’s primary responsibility to discuss events that have wide-ranging significance, like how Kara stops shaving her legs in the winter, and how I dropped my car keys down a storm drain that one time. Universal stuff like that.

So now that I know what it’s like to write a column for a year, I think I’ll keep it up and see how it goes for a while longer. Thanks for reading, or, at the very least, for not mounting an angry letter-writing campaign to eject me from the paper. I hope you’ve found this column to be fun and not-at-all educational, like an IMAX movie, but cheaper, and hopefully less likely to make you nauseous.

You can offer Mike Todd some asparagus online at cox1013@hotmail.com. He won’t eat it, though.

'Bout Good Frickin' time

Here's another one of Hofer's shots from either Guatemala or Mordor:



His original caption read "Comunidad de Fatima." I think that would be orcish for "pretty," if orcs had a word for that.

Trivial pursuits

Board games mess with your head. Last Saturday night, for a brief moment, I actually felt cool because I was the only one in the room who could hum the tune to “Someday My Prince Will Come.” Only a powerful hallucinogen should be able to make a twenty-eight year-old man be proud of something like that, yet the game Cranium seems to have the same effect.

I was like, “Hmmm HMMMM hm hmmmm hm hmmmm – Yeah, that’s right. In your face! Boo-yah! Nobody messes with my Snow White skills.”

The stupidity of getting competitive over a board game only becomes apparent in retrospect. At the time, the only thing that matters in the world is that you are the fastest person to get your partner to guess “let the cat out of the bag” without using any verbal communication. Strategy note: Keeping actual cats in bags near the game-playing area makes that one much easier.

Of course, spending Saturday night playing board games is probably not something one should be talking about at all. If we had even a shred of coolness left, we wouldn’t have been playing board games in the first place; we would have been out at the bars spending five bucks for the same beer that costs fifty cents to drink in our living room. A couple of my buddies had driven up from a few hours away to hang out with me and my wife Kara for the weekend, and our idea of showing them a wild and debauched time was busting out Cranium instead of Trivial Pursuit.

Having friends over is not as simple as it used to be. Feeding them is much more of an issue when you’re a grown-up. Back in the day, my friends would just walk into the house, make a beeline for the kitchen and plow through whatever they could find in the pantry or the fridge, and all I’d have to do is run and hide the next day when I heard Mom shriek, “What happened to all of our leftovers?” The following weekend, the food would have magically regenerated, my friends would come back over and the process would repeat.

Now, though, Kara and I actually have to think ahead about what we can possibly feed people when all we have in the house is cereal in the cupboard and ranch dressing in the fridge that is probably old enough to apply for a driver’s license. Compounding the difficulty, Kara has this crazy notion that eating pizza for breakfast and then eating pizza for lunch somehow rules out eating pizza for dinner.

Plus, my buddy Jered (who cheats at Cranium, by the way) just eats one huge meal a day, like a large predator. He shovels that meal down as if he’s afraid somebody’s going to try to take it from him. The only person who really needs to be concerned about food theft is Kara, as I regularly impose a slow-eating tax on her. Once I finish my meal, I have no choice but to gaze longingly at whatever she has left on her plate. “The slow-eating tax collector is coming, isn’t he?” she’ll ask. I nod, and she surrenders some of her fries. I don’t know how I ever got enough to eat before I had Kara’s food to steal.

Jered doesn’t have to worry about the tax collector coming to his plate. He eats with one arm guarding his food, and he gives off the same vibe as a strange dog at a food bowl; you don’t want to put your hands near his face for fear that they might become part of the meal. When he’s done eating, Jered drags his leftovers under a bush in the yard and covers them with some dirt, sleeping nearby to fend off any wandering coyotes.

You can smack Mike Todd’s hand off your plate at cox1013@hotmail.com.

The roof gets going

As I watch the drips of water glide across the mud room ceiling and drop onto the towels that are waiting for them on the floor, it's difficult not to come to the conclusion that the bedraggled old purple tent that my dad and I used to take camping when I was a Boy Scout was far more waterproof than the house I'm living in now. That tent survived many years of twelve-year-old boys running around it, wielding three-pound Swiss Army knives and setting random things ablaze right next to it. Through all that time, the tent spoiled me into thinking that it is actually possible to keep water out when it wants in. Being a homeowner has taught me that water is like a five-year-old: It can't be controlled; it can only be only temporarily diverted. But you can't make water be quiet by giving it a GameBoy.

My house never had to face any knife-wielding preteens, yet it holds back water as well as a cheese grater, which, incidentally, comes as an option on Swiss Army knives now. My wife Kara and I made the unpleasant discovery about the seive-like nature of our roof after we'd lived here for two days.

A torrential rainfall blew through on our second night in the house. All of our belongings were still packed away in garbage bags, because boxes are for snobs. Actually, two years later, much of our very important stuff is still in those garbage bags, which will hopefully save us a few minutes when we decide to chuck it all in ten years.

That night, the sound of water pattering on the roof suddenly began to sound a little too close. Kara and I sat there, frozen, straining our ears to hear where the dripping noise was coming from. When we finally realized what was going on, it was like a scene from a horror movie. "The drip – It's coming from inside the house! Get out! Get out!"

That wasn't supposed to happen. We paid/wasted $500 for a certified building inspector to come look at the house before we bought it. He was highly skilled at poking things with a screwdriver. He carried his screwdriver in a leather holster like Wyatt Earp, and we he saw something of interest, like a wall or the neighbor's cat, he'd give it a little jab, twirl the screwdriver around his finger, and stick it back in the holster, satisfied. I figure we paid about fifty bucks per jab.

"This is a well-built house," he told us before jabbing us with his screwdriver and leaving. "I don't see anything too wrong with it." He made no mention of the impending water features that came with the place.

After moving in, I spent more time on top of the house than inside it. I was a house cowboy, riding high on my shingled horse, straddling the roofline and yelling, "Yee-haw! I got me a hankerin' for mah old apartment!"

I actually did manage to patch the roof (seventeenth try was the charm), and all was well, until a couple of days ago, when a new leak sprung in our mud room. I can just picture the first little bead of water as it moved back and forth across the ceiling, like a Skill Crane at an arcade, looking for the best place to drop. Kara's watercolors on her little drafting table made a perfect target. Her most recent piece is now entitled "Still life on wrinkly paper with several rust-colored splotches."

We're seriously considering just punching out the windows and letting nature have the mud room back. Or maybe we'll just pitch Dad's old tent out there.

You can jab Mike Todd with a screwdriver online at cox1013@hotmail.com.

It's raining wife

My wife, the badass:



For the record, Kara looks much better when she's not wearing a leather helmet with a strange dude strapped to her back.

Crazy like a goose

My Dad finally picked up one sorely needed ally in his never-ending battle to keep squirrels off the bird feeder. While his banging on the windows, hollering, “Get! Get!” keeps the squirrels away for about the same amount of time as it takes to execute a Google search, the clamping jaws of death of the neighborhood fox seem to be slightly more persuasive.

The red bushy-tailed fox started lurking around my parents’ house a few seasons ago; it doesn’t come around all that often, but every now and again, when I’m home for the weekend, I’ll hear a cry of “Look out the window! Foxy Loxy’s here! Look, look, look!”

Long ago, my parents used to run to the windows even when we had deer in the yard – to me, that’s just not worth standing up for. It’s like getting excited about someone cutting you off on the New Jersey Turnpike. It’s weirder if it doesn’t happen. There are so many deer where my parents live that, after they finish gnoshing on the rhododendron in front of the house, the deer just waltz inside to see if there’s any leftover pizza in the fridge. They like it with extra cheese and azalea.

But when the fox is running around outside, it’s much more exciting, like Wild America is in the backyard. Marty Stouffer should be out there, pleasantly describing the fox’s activities while making some of his famous French bread pizzas.

Last winter, Dad went out in the backyard and shot the fox. With a camera, of course. He wouldn’t ever shoot it with anything else, because Dad is the kind of guy who catches groundhogs in have-a-heart traps, drives them outside of town and drops them off by the river. Sometimes you’ll see those groundhogs on the side of the road, wearing backpacks and doo-rags, hitchhiking back to my parents’ house so that they can continue the excavation project they started under the deck.

When Dad took the fateful picture of the fox, he caught a magical moment at just the perfect time, as the fox ran out on the melting ice of a frozen pond, stalking a flock of geese. At the moment the shutter made that classic sound --BEEP!-- the two geese closest to the fox were beginning to flap their wings to take off, while the others anxiously strolled away in the other direction, nervously whistling to themselves, exactly like I did in ninth grade when Brian Kiernan from the football team put my buddy Jeff in the trash can outside the girls’ room.

While the fox didn’t have any luck on that particular occasion, Dad scored a great photograph, which ran on the front page of the local paper the next week. I even have a framed copy hanging up in my house, which works out well, because I’m getting too old for Phish posters.

For Christmas this year, Mom gave Dad a huge, wrapped rectangle. When he first pulled the wrapping off, I thought she’d given him an enormous blown-up copy of the photograph. Upon closer inspection, you could see it was all done in pastel, which is artist-talk for fancy crayons. Mom had commissioned a friend of the family, who somehow managed to be an extremely talented artist without the requisite craziness, to reimagine Dad’s photograph as a pastel painting. That was a way cooler present than the sweater I gave him.

So now Foxy Loxy is immortalized on my parents’ living room wall, and Dad is the new Ansel Adams of the house, only cooler. I mean, if you had to guess who was going to win in a fist fight, and all you knew was that the two guys duking it out were named Ansel and Maurice, seriously, who’s picking Ansel to win it? Nobody. Also, my mom’s name is Clara, so if she ever makes a hip-hop album, she should definitely call it Clarafication.

When you’re done chasing geese around the yard, you can drop Mike Todd a line at cox1013@hotmail.com.

Johnny on the spot

I joined the Involuntary Polar Bear Club in my neighbor’s pond when I was eight years old. My membership was expedited by the inflatable donut sled that I was riding at the time, which proved very difficult to dismount at high speed. Once the sled inadvertently turned into an amphibious vehicle, I fell into the icy slush water and was, as you might imagine, very invigorated. The pond was only waist-deep near the shore, so I waded to the water’s edge and plunked myself onto the bank like a frozen trout. Being eight years old, I was already well-versed in the arts of crying and screaming, both of which I commenced with great enthusiasm.

Fortunately for me, my buddy Johnny was there to see the whole thing. He promptly recognized the gravity of the situation and took off running like a Baywatch lifeguard, except that he wasn’t jiggling or running in slow motion, and also he wasn’t running towards me or towards my parents’ house, but off over the horizon to some unknown destination, presumably hoping that wherever he ended up, they’d have candy. By the time my parents heard the shrieking and came down to get me, Johnny had wandered into a different time zone.

This is the story that Johnny still has to suffer through on at least an annual basis. Sure, he was a groomsman at my wedding, and we’ve had innumerable other adventures in the twenty years since that day at the pond, but that is the one that sticks. If you’re going to do something embarrassing around my family, and you don’t want to hear about it for the next several decades, you should set off lively firecrackers next to your ears every time you pull into our driveway.

If you ask him now why he couldn’t find my house, which was about a hundred yards away, and which we’d come from about fifteen minutes earlier, and which had our own tracks in the snow leading directly to it, Johnny will tell you that he’d only been to my house a couple of times before that day, and that he’s not the one who rode a sled into a frozen pond anyway, so who’s really the stupid one in this story?

The bottom line is that Johnny is a good friend and a good person, and I’m fortunate to have had a friend like him over so many years. It’s just a bonus that the river of “Johnny stories” never runs dry. He is even beginning to write his own dictionary.

Johnny recently explained to me that he had just “rooftopped” his new iPod. Rooftopping is a term that should never have needed to exist, but since my friends rooftop so many of their earthly possessions, they needed a term for it, like how the Inuit need lots of words to describe snow.

Rooftopping occurs when you put something on the roof of your car, forget about it and drive off. My buddies have lost several wallets and entire CD collections to rooftopping. Here’s the best advice you’ll ever get: Never set something temporarily on top of your car. No good can come of it.

A perfect example: A couple of years ago, Johnny taught a class to college students at the University of Colorado. He collected the students’ final exams, put them in a box and promptly rooftopped them. The next day, when he asked the students to send him an email with a copy of their final exams attached, a student asked, “Why do we need to do that? You already have the printed copies.”

“I just like to have a backup,” Johnny replied, and quickly changed the subject.

I tell you this so that you’ll know that if you ever see Johnny at a gas station, you should follow him to see what goodies will fall your way. Also, if you are sending your children to the University of Colorado, maybe you can still get your money back.

You can put Mike Todd on your roof and speed away at cox1013@hotmail.com.