Jack Frost’s cold shoulder

I can’t believe Christmas is almost here. It seems like just last weekend that I was out in my T-shirt mowing the yard, mainly because last weekend, I was actually out in my T-shirt mowing the yard. Last Saturday was beautiful, sunny and almost sixty degrees despite being less than a week shy of the winter solstice. Hearing a lawn mower awakened from its hibernation in the middle of December is incongruous, like seeing pictures of clothed people on the internet.

My original intent with the mower was to chop up the stubborn leaves that had refused to blow into the neighbor’s yard over the past couple of months. As I pushed the mower along, though, I noticed that the grass had actually grown taller since the beginning of November, when it was last mowed. Maybe global warming isn’t as bad as every reputable scientist in the world seems to think, but from the looks of things, Frosty’s silk hat is going to be spending the vast majority of this winter sopping up a jolly old puddle.

While I was outside mowing, my wife Kara was inside painting the bathroom. We’re trying to make our house look presentable so that we can sucker someone into buying it. I hope it sells quickly so that we can go back to being slobs. Being clean takes way too much energy. The universe wants entropy, and entropy is what I aim to give it.

As I hopped into bed on Saturday night and pulled the covers up, a wave of sickly wintergreen scent smacked me right in my olfactory epithelium. Or in both of my olfactory epitheliums, if I have two of them. Wikipedia is somewhat unclear on this point.

Kara saw the look on my face and laughed. I knew right away what she’d done: she’d busted out the Icy Hot.

“Ew, dude, did you roll around in Pepto Bismol?” I asked.

“It’s Icy Hot. It makes my muscles feel better. I’m all sore from painting today,” she said.

If you’re not familiar with Icy Hot, it’s a cream that is manufactured entirely from Pepto and wintergreen gum, then it’s enriched into an isotope that, when applied to the skin, emits odors so powerful that muscle pain suddenly drops way down on the list of things that are bothering you. If you’re sitting in the same room with someone who has just put on some Icy Hot, you can actually watch the vapors ruffling the curtains.

At least I assume that’s how it works. I’ve never tried the stuff before. I’m a lotion-phobe. Even as a kid, my parents would chase me around with suntan lotion at the beach as I ran and cried, my face turning red to match my shoulders. If I’d been one of the people in Buffalo Bill’s basement in Silence of the Lambs, the scene would have gone like this: “It rubs the lotion on its skin.”

“Oh no, it doesn’t!”

Bringing up Silence of the Lambs in the context of what honestly started out many paragraphs ago to be a discussion of the holidays may seem a little strange, but I’m not the first to make such a connection. Have you taken a good listen to the lyrics of “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” lately? I just noticed this line as the song was playing on the radio a couple of days ago: “There’ll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago.” Scary ghost stories? Really? That must be a tradition my family’s been missing out on: everyone sitting around on Christmas Eve by the fire, eating cookies, as Dad tells us our favorite story, Rudolph the Vengeful Reindeer.

It sends emails to Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Getting housed

The news these days is littered with stories about the impending crash of the real estate market, which is why my wife Kara and I are going to move into a different house as soon as possible: we want to make absolutely sure that we don’t miss out on the opportunity to lose our life savings. So tomorrow, we’re going to drive one town over to meet with a seller’s real estate agent, where we’ll sign a piece of paper that says that we’re all allowed to stop lying to each other. Until you sign the paper signifying that everyone has agreed on a price, the lies just fly around from all sides like we think we’re running for office.

“We don’t want to play back-and-forth over this like a game of tennis, so here’s the lowest we can possibly go,” their agent told us recently.

“That’s refreshing,” my wife Kara replied. “We don’t want to play tennis either, so here’s the highest we can possibly go,” throwing out a much lower number and leaving us all staring into the vast void in between the two. If you had dropped a rock into that void, you could have fixed yourself a cup of hot tea before it hit bottom.

Fortunately, everybody was lying, so after several grueling sets of tennis, we finally arrived at a number with which we were all mutually unhappy.

Kara has been our chief negotiator over the past couple of weeks. I don’t have the stomach for it. She’s our Simon Cowell; I’m our Paula Abdul. This much was obvious even as we took our first walk-through of the house, when you’re supposed to pretend that you would sooner challenge a porcupine to a Greco-Roman wrestling match than live there. Even though you don’t want the real estate agent to smell enthusiasm on you, I still just can’t muster up the guts to say anything bad about a perfect stranger’s house. “Good job, house. You came out here and you did your thing. I’m proud of you,” I’d say, standing up and clapping using only my palms, seeming vaguely inebriated.

Then Kara would chime in: “Oh, this is terrible, simply dreadful. If this house was a lifeguard, a lot of people would be drowning.”

Kara’s strategy was of course the better one, so I tried to keep my mouth shut as much as possible. Besides, it’s just a house. It’s not like it’s a video game or anything, where one false move could be responsible for the destruction of entire civilizations. You need to keep these things in perspective.

So now that we’ve agreed on a price, we just have to worry about what the market’s going to do, which of course nobody can really predict. Several years ago, I was convinced that I had psychic abilities, which would certainly be useful now. Like all the great clairvoyants, my original psychic inspiration came from the old Fox show Joe Millionaire. See, I guessed on the first episode that Joe would end up with Zora, which he eventually did, thereby convincing me of my great powers, which I then used to predict that we were just bluffing about the whole Iraq thing.

So while my powers might be lacking in the realm of the consequential, I can still divine that the next reality show you watch on Fox will go like this: recap of last week, five minutes of new show, Taco Bell commercials featuring people who seem inordinately surprised that they’re full after consuming a 730-calorie burrito, ten minutes of recap of the previous five minutes of new show, GEICO commercials that are better than the show you’re watching, attractive woman’s emotional breakdown, recap of the emotional breakdown for anyone who suffered a severe head trauma in the past ten seconds but is still watching the remainder of the show, then a teaser for next week, which will be a recap of this week.

You can share your chalupa with Mike Todd online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Ferret rustling

My favorite thing about this time of year is going into the basement, brushing the fuzz off of the Christmas decorations and bringing them up to the living room, where our ferret Chopper will romp through all of the plastic bags filled with fake pine things and red candles that we’ll never burn, spreading his fuzzy little holiday cheer and scratching his left cornea on a glittered ornament.

Actually, that last part is a trick he just picked up this year. I don’t suppose we’ll turn it into an annual tradition.

If we had waited to name Chopper until he was a little older, we probably would have named him Russell after his favorite thing in the world to do: rustle. I guess if we’re still thinking that the onomatopoeia thing is cool in a couple of years, we can name our first kid Buzz or Kerplunk.

But a few days ago Chopper embarked on one rustle too many, opening the ornament box with his nose and putting an eyeball, literally, onto one of the glittering globes.

When he came romping across the floor a little while later, he only had one eye open, which I attributed to him just waking up. Every time you see him, he’s just woken up. He could beat a teenage koala in a sleeping contest.

“What are you, a pirate now?” I asked him. Then I held him up towards my wife Kara. “Arrrr, matey, I be makin’ me poop deck wherever I dern well please. Yar!”

“Baby, I think his eye is bothering him,” she said, simultaneously proving her viability as a candidate for Household Pet Optometrist while knocking me out of the race altogether.

I’m a big wimp about taking our ferret to the vet. We’ve been very fortunate over his five years that he hasn’t required very many visits. The first time I took him there, it was just for a little bug bite that turned out not to need any treatment, but the vet took Chopper’s temperature anyway, which didn’t really go over very well. You should have seen his little legs churning when he realized what was going on back there. He looked like Scooby Doo when he and Shaggy see the phantom coming towards them.

Eventually, Chopper gave up, standing there on the metal table and looking up at me like, “You’re just going to stand there? Why don’t you DO something about this?”

So that trip cost us forty dollars to find out that our ferret doesn’t like to have metal things shoved up his rear end, something I’m guessing I could easily have discovered at home for free.

But this time, sitting in the waiting room, I felt relieved that a professional was going to check our little varmint out and help make him better. As I sat on the bench, a guy with a large plastic crate next to him leaned towards me and said, “I found these little black flecks all over my house. Turned out they were falling off of my cat. So I picked up one of the flecks and looked at it under a magnifying glass, and it looked like some kind of insect larva. You believe that?”

“That’s very interesting,” I said, shoving Choppy’s crate away from the infested Larval Cat so fast that the crate left burning tracks on the bench like the Delorean in Back to the Future.

It turns out that Chopper is going to be just fine. We just have to give him some eye drops for the next couple of days. Incidentally, we’ve recently found that giving eye drops to a squirming ferret is every bit as easy as painting a self-portrait on the blades of a spinning windmill.

You can send your 1.21 jigowatts to Mike Todd’s flux capacitor online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Some good grass

This is what whole grain looks like in its natural environment:

Cute, right? That's why you should eat pork chops instead.

The state of the reunion

Last weekend, some friends and I mustered up the courage to attend our ten-year high school reunion. I still don’t exactly understand why this took any courage at all, but somehow just thinking about high school brings all the inherent social anxiety rushing right back at you, and instead of all the good times, you can suddenly only remember the time you watched your date making out with your ex-friend at the Homecoming Dance. But one good thing about getting ready to hang around with former classmates when you’re pushing thirty is that you don’t really have to worry about zits anymore, which works out nicely because you need the extra time to focus on your bald spots.

Everyone knew roughly who would be in attendance at our reunion thanks to eVite, the ubiquitous internet invitation site that lets people post whether or not they plan to attend. My favorite eVite response was from my buddy Gimp, who let everyone in our class know: “I’m coming and I’m available.” Perhaps he’d be better able to capitalize on his availability if his buddies stopped calling him Gimp. But we’ve been friends since the first grade, so at this point, I think we’re all a little embarrassed to ask what his real name is.

Another classmate made the trenchant eVite observation that “10 years ago, they didn't have eVites.” Which got me to thinking, ten years ago I’d never even been on the internet, which means I hadn’t yet received that fateful email from Bill Gates asking me to help him beta test his new email tracking program, a favor for which he was willing to reward me handsomely. I’m still living off the residual income from the first time I forwarded that email to ten friends; I just work because I like complaining and fluorescent light bulbs.

It was almost exactly ten years ago when my college roommate demonstrated the power of the internet when he pulled a folded piece of paper out of his duffel bag and taped it to the inside of his closet door. That paper was a photo printout of Jenny McCarthy, who at that moment was so enthralled with the bubbles floating around at the car wash that she apparently forgot several important pieces of clothing.

“Where did you get that?” I asked him.

“On the internet,” he said.

“They have pictures like THAT on the internet?” I asked, as Ed McMahon burst through the door to give me the giant novelty check accompanying my Most Naïve Question Ever award.

But as I found last Saturday night, even though much can change in ten years (most prominently the collective girth of the class of ’96), much also stays the same. Walking into that room filled with familiar faces that I hadn’t seen in a decade was so surreal that it felt like a dream, a feeling that was exacerbated by the fact that about halfway through the reunion, I realized that I’d shown up wearing only my underwear.

I also discovered that even though a picture is worth a thousand words, a baby picture normally comes accompanied by the thousand words anyway.

After we’d been there for a few minutes, Gimp tapped me on the arm and pointed across the room with his eyes.

“Dude, check out Lawrence over there,” he said. Lawrence was the first kid in our grade to have armpit hair, a fact many of us noticed while he was administering headlocks to us in front of the girls’ gym class. Lawrence brought bullying to a high art form; his armpits were his brushes and our heads were his canvas.

While I’ve been greatly anticipating letting myself get fat and bald after the reunion, it does seem to indicate some degree of justice in the universe to have seen that Lawrence, once again, has a head start on the rest of us.

You can ask Mike Todd to help beta test your new email tracking program online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Getting Rob'd

Here's a shot my buddy Rob took in Australia:

Rob's shooting a behind-the-scenes jaunt for some movie over there. I only mention that so that you'll think I'm a little cooler by association. Did it work?

Giving thanks and wedgies

It’s that time of year again for cranberry sauce, unbridled gluttony and finally getting a chance to use that awl on your Swiss Army Knife for poking new holes in your belt. Oh, and for high school reunions. If you’re a geezer like me, that last one might apply to you. I’m still in denial about the whole thing. “I can’t believe I’m old enough to be having a ten-year high school reunion this weekend,” I said to myself this morning as I poured cream and Geritol into my Metamucil.

People plan their high school reunions for this time of year because all the scattered ex-high schoolers migrate home for Thanksgiving, much like geese, which is why geese are so much more deserving than turkeys to be the mascot for this holiday. I think it’s time we gave the turkeys a break and started chowing down on some good ol’ down home American Canadian geese.

I came up with this idea earlier today on my out to my car from work, as I carefully navigated through the minefield of sundry goose-related debris. If you haven’t noticed, the geese are taking over. They already have our golf courses, parks and Wawa signs. Now they want our parking lots. Who do they think they are, sea gulls?

A few years back, my wife Kara and I lived in an apartment complex that featured a rather large and quite algified pond, a verdant lagoon that stirred romance in the heart of every mosquito and was rivaled in beauty only by the Love Canal. Every morning around three o’clock, the resident geese would begin their enthusiastic and cacophonous honking; they were either fighting or making down-covered romance, but either way they kept us up all night. On beautiful, breezy Spring nights our closed windows would rattle in their frames.

“Make them stop,” my wife Kara would say, pulling her pillow over her head.

“Please stop it, geese,” I’d mutter, making a mental note to pick up a pellet gun on the way to work in the morning.

Not that I’d actually shoot a goose from an apartment window, but I’m pretty sure I’d have no problem putting goose meat right at the top of my personal food pyramid. Or at the bottom. I don’t understand the food pyramid anymore since they turned it into a rainbow and put a little stick person walking up the stairs on the side of it. It looks like a cross between a Skittles commercial and an M.C. Escher painting now.

I feel bad about eating most animals; it’s not their fault they’re so delicious. But I could go on an all-goose diet with no qualms at all. Goose flakes for breakfast. Peanut butter and goose sandwiches for lunch. And snacking on some Goose Combos would really honk one’s hunger away.

Regardless, there’s no time to convince the rest of my family about the merits of eating goose for Thanksgiving. Mom starts cooking three days before big gatherings like this, though I also do my fair share by carrying the dirty dishes ten feet from the dining room table to the kitchen, where Dad washes them. It’s quite the equitable system we’ve worked out.

And I only have a few more days to fret before my ten-year reunion. I hope everyone who didn’t give me a wedgie in high school is doing well.

“Hey, how’s my bald spot looking back there?” I asked Kara today. I haven’t held up a mirror to look at the back of my head since I was about twelve. I don’t want to know what’s going on back there. I’ll just assume that the back of my head still looks as lush and hirsute as Pierce Brosnan’s chest.

“Babe, it looks fine. You don’t have a bald spot,” she said. She always knows how to make me feel better.

Then she said, “But don’t get your hopes up for your twenty-year reunion.”

You can fight Mike Todd for the last slice of pecan pie online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Missing the estrogen train

My wife Kara left me this afternoon for a woman. Incidentally, the previous sentence will probably be the title of my first country song, if I ever write one. And if I ever get around to writing a second one, I think it should be about salvation and the benefits of aluminum recycling, because “Redemption Song (got my five-cent deposit back)” is a really good title for a country song, too.

But the truth is that Kara left me for not just one woman, but several. Fortunately for me, the situation is only temporary; she’ll be back tomorrow after her big girls’ night out in the city, an event to which my invitation was neither proffered nor desired. Kara and her friends have dealt me the terrible fate of having to stay home playing video games instead of spending the evening in front of better-dressed people showing off both of my signature dance moves: “Bounce up and down, with the beat if possible” and “Blend in, blend in, oh man I hope I’m blending in.” The world will be deprived of these innovations in modern dance because this evening’s party train is to be powered entirely by estrogen. In any event, it’s safe to say that there won’t be a toilet flushed or a tooth brushed around here for at least another twenty-four hours.

It’s interesting to me that a group of girls can go out in the city without any male accompaniment and plan to dance just with each other. This is, of course, roughly analogous to dumping chum into a shark tank. Which is why, just before she leaves for girls’ night out, you should tell your wife, “Hey babe, you’ve got a little makeup smudge on your cheek.” Then as you’re gently wiping her cheek off with one finger, write “BACK OFF I’M MARRIED!” on her forehead in permanent marker. Magicians call that misdirection.

Guys cannot dance by themselves in a big group. A circle of dancing guys is universally a pathetic sight, unless the guys really know what they’re doing and also they’re part of a performance of Fiddler on the Roof.

When I went to a bachelor party in Atlantic City a couple of years ago, we were all having a fine time hydrating ourselves in an Irish Pub when some of the single guys got the fine idea to drag everyone to the night club next door. Fortunately for us, no self-respecting club even allows a bunch of guys to come in without any women in their group. The bouncers saved us from ourselves, though a couple of my buddies pleaded their cases enough to ensure that we still got to shed some dignity before we left.

But now that I’ve got some quality alone time this evening, I finally have a chance to sit down, relax, listen and really get to know The Battle for Middle Earth II while the radio plays in the background. I’ve started listening to the pop station lately. If you don’t listen to pop music, you might not have been informed that Justin Timberlake is single-handedly bringing sexy back. That should be a major relief to those of you who thought you were going to have to bring sexy back all by yourselves. You have to admit: even if you decide to continue laboring over your sexy back-bringing efforts, it will be good to have some star power behind your cause.

Some people might be asking themselves, “Where did sexy go, anyway?”

This is a valid question, and if you had to pinpoint the exact moment when sexy left, it would probably be about the time that Bob Dylan showed up in those Victoria’s Secret commercials, which were less sexy than your average episode of the 700 Club. Still, those commercials did beg the question: “How many butts must a thong ride up, before you call it a thong?”

You can show Mike Todd how to do the worm online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Other people's pictures

It's been a while since I've posted any Guatemala pics. Here's another shot from the Jeff Hofer archive:

I think this shot should be on the cover of a magazine, like maybe National Geographic or Masonry Modeling for Kids.

Down for the count

A few nights ago, I sat on the couch in the living room, minding my own lack of business with my laptop located in what I thought was a perfectly sensible place: atop my lap.

My wife Kara walked into the room and pointed at me. “You should put your computer on the dining room table and go work in there,” she said. “Some people at work today were talking about how typing with your laptop on your lap messes with your physiology.”

“My physiology?” I asked.

“Well, they said it lowers your sperm count,” she replied.

I stopped clacking on the keyboard and looked up at her, scooching the computer towards my knees. Even though I’d never heard any such thing in my life, and I sincerely doubted that there could possibly be any truth to what she was saying, better safe than sterile.

Back when I was single and living in my own place, the only female influence in my apartment was Mama Celeste, and she hardly ever strolled into the room to randomly start discussions about male fertility. She was too busy providing dinner seven nights a week. Since getting married, though, I’ve found that reproductive conversations will just pounce on you, like Hobbes greeting Calvin at the front door. Not that Kara was necessarily bringing up reproduction as it pertained to the two of us, but her concern for my gametes sure seemed to be heading in that direction.

To find out if there was any real reason for her concern, I did a quick Google search from the safety of the dining room table. It turns out that some researchers did recently reach the very conclusion that Kara passed along to me. I was relieved to discover, though, that the problem wasn’t due to any sort of radiation. Electric things kind of freak me out like that. I don’t even like sleeping with the alarm clock too close to my head.

It seems that computers’ prophylactic effects are related to the heat that comes off the bottom of the laptop, so there’s no need to fashion any radiation-blocking aluminum foil underpants for your loved ones. Those would probably just make the problem worse, anyway, like you were preparing them to be a baked potato. If anything, asbestos underpants would most likely be the best investment, if you can find any; check with your local fire department.

Computer use does seem to be getting awfully hazardous lately. Not only do computers turn perfectly normal people into infertile, orc-slaying nerds, but some laptop batteries can catch fire rather spontaneously. You may have caught that news item on your way to the emergency room. The article I read regarding laptop use and its effects on fertility didn’t mention what happens if one’s laptop bursts into flames while resting on one’s lap (probably because they couldn’t get anyone to sign up for that study), but I think, regardless, it might be time to turn the laptop into a tabletop.

Kara continued, “Not that it’s any big deal now, but, you know, someday. We might as well not take any chances.”

I said, “You know what the people in my office were talking about today? The best way to change diapers and the semantic differences between spit-up and throw-up. Apparently, spit-up is the good kind.”

The most disturbing thing out of all of this is that Kara apparently has much more interesting conversations at work than I do. Even if I’d known the little tidbit about male fertility and laptops, I just can’t imagine how I would have broached that particular topic with my co-workers.

“So, Vernon, did you notice that the boss seemed a little testy today? Speaking of testy, guess what my wife told me?”

You can shoot Mike Todd with a fire extinguisher online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Popping an election

Have you caught '06 midterm election fever? Here are some of the early results:

*75% of precincts reporting. (Image source here. Update: Image ain't accessible there anymore. Much respect to whoever came up with it, though. Word.)