Sometimes, the gym hits you back

If these words appear to be written by someone in peak physical condition, it’s only because we just put a new elliptical machine in our basement, and the effects are starting to kick in. I haven’t actually used it yet, but with the amount of money my wife Kara just spent on this machine, I’m already feeling the burn.

Actually, it’s kind of nice knowing that the machine is down there. Just being in proximity to exercise equipment makes you feel like you’re in better shape. It’s a similar theory to how just smelling doughnuts makes me fatter, because then I eat them.

As Kara has noted several times, we’re going to save money on this deal. She just quit the gym, so with no more monthly membership fees, we’ll break even on this purchase sometime around the Tuesday before the sun burns itself out.

You might notice that I only mentioned Kara quitting the gym. I tried to quit, too, but we ran into some murky issues when it became apparent that I’d never been there before. The gym is a place I’ve avoided ever since teachers stopped making me go there, in part because it’s a fundamentally dishonest place, designed to fool your body into thinking it needs more muscles than it actually does, and in part because of all the oddly unashamed naked people wandering around.

“This lady was just standing there naked,” Kara reported after a recent visit to the locker room. “Like, not to get changed. She was just chatting and hanging out as if she had clothes on.”

In my limited gym experience, it seems that one’s proclivity for walking around naked is directly proportional to how many years a person has under their nonexistent belt. I’m not sure if this is a generational phenomenon, perhaps inspired by gym classes of yesteryear in which kids were comfortable showering and changing in front of each other, or if you get to certain point in life when you think, “You know what? I’m going to wander around for a while before I put my pants on.”

When you go to the gym, you’re telling your body that you need more muscle to perform your daily activities. But if that was true, wouldn’t you have those muscles already? The cavemen who needed to catch animals ran faster because they were chasing animals all day. The ones who needed to carry rocks got stronger from lugging rocks around. The ones who developed caveman software got flabby. And they were happy with that, until their systems crashed and they got the Blue Rock of Death, which was much more gruesome than its modern counterpart.

So Kara and I have called another piece of exercise equipment into being. I’m not saying we won’t get our use out of it, but the vast majority of these dust-collecting basement-dwellers are born of hope, only to die of neglect. Perhaps the lone exception is my dad’s old exercise bike, which was purchased in 1971 with three pinto beans and an extra scratchy burlap sack, and which he still rides several times per week. That thing has more miles on it than Air Force One.

We might as well decide we like having the machine in our basement, since it’s four inches wider than the only exit door. I’m pretty sure the delivery guys welded it together down there, creating our very own ship in a bottle. People may come and go from this house, but that machine isn’t going anywhere without a long visit from a blowtorch and a hacksaw. Hopefully, when we stop using it for exercise in a few months, it’ll make a nice drying rack. And I can always use the cup holder in front for my chocolate shakes.

You can snap Mike Todd with your towel at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Thirty going on therapy

“I think I’m having a premature midlife crisis,” my friend Josh wrote to me last week, his nerves fraying from the pressures of work and parenthood. Josh isn’t the kind of person to complain, so I understood that he must have been in serious need of a sympathetic ear.

“Don’t worry, man,” I told him. “It’s not premature.”

It’s a strange phenomenon that the better friends you are with someone, the worse of a person you can be toward them.

“I don’t feel like you’re taking my MLC seriously,” he responded. At that moment, I realized the severity of the situation. If you’re planning on saying “midlife crisis” so much that you can save yourself a significant amount of time by acronyming it, you probably need your friends to act more like friends, and less like the people who used to draw anatomical diagrams with Sharpies on your face when you’d been drinking too much. (Note to our children when they’re old enough to read this: Drinking too much warm milk.)

“Let’s catch up on the phone soon. If that doesn’t sound like a plan, you could always just purchase a car with eight cylinders,” I replied.

I recently bumped into an acquaintance from college who overachieved on his own midlife crisis by purchasing a car with twelve cylinders. That’s at least 50% more cylinders than the average fragile male psyche requires.

“You know, there are twelve cylinders in there,” he said, pointing at the hood.

“What a colossal waste of gas,” I thought.

“Cool car,” I said. I had to be nice, since we weren’t really friends.

When Josh and I finally caught up on the phone the next day, he said, “Remember when we used to complain about having a quarter-life crisis?”

A quarter-life crisis happens when you worry about getting a job after you graduate. A third-life crisis follows shortly thereafter, when you worry about getting married, having kids or how you’re going to avoid doing either one.

I didn’t have the heart to tell Josh, who is gainfully employed, happily married and frantically child-rearing, that once you’ve weathered the 1/4- and 1/3-life crises, any subsequent crises must be of the midlife variety, since we’ve run out of denominators greater than two. Nobody has a two-fifths-life crisis.

Really, though, I have a hard time mustering sympathy for anyone who gets well into their thirties without even a hint a bald spot, as Josh has done.

“I lost my job,” a friend will say.

“But you have a full head of hair,” I will reply, as if this evens things out.

As a small group of friends drove to lunch last week, our friend Judi commented from the backseat, “Nice haircut, Mike,” which was clearly a setup for a punchline.

“Thanks,” I said, bracing myself.

“You can barely see the combover anymore,” she said.

As someone who has been ever-vigilant about striking down proto-combovers when they appear in the bathroom mirror, I took great umbrage at the suggestion that I’d ever let one take root. Still, as my hair continues its great migration from my head down to my shoulders, I am developing a new understanding for how Giulianiesque cranial situations occur. A couple more hairs jump the part every day, innocently enough. Repeat this process for years or decades, though, and your ear becomes the only thing stopping your part from sliding right off your head altogether.

The good news for Josh is that even though he got no sympathy from me due to his unfair follicular advantages, his crisis appears to be short-lived.

“Everything’s fine. I’m just stressed out at work, but that should get better in the next few weeks,” he said.

If not, he can always count on a little extra support from his friends. And if that doesn’t work, there’s always the dealership.

You can invite Mike Todd to combover at mikectodd@gmail.com.

The roof might be on fire

Last week, for perhaps the first time in my life, I paid attention to the stop sign in our neighborhood, mainly because I was on foot. I still didn’t come to a complete stop, but I did break stride for a moment when I saw this message about halfway up the signpost: “Welcome. This is a neighborhood watch community.”

Was anyone going to tell me? We’ve lived here for almost four years, and our neighbors have gone dangerously unwatched the whole time.

“I’m a little offended nobody’s tried to deputize us,” I said to the dog as we rounded the corner, scanning the horizon for any suspicious activity.

While we didn’t find any crime out of which to take a bite, I did notice that several of our neighbors still had Christmas trees at the ends of their driveways. The trees had been buried for the past couple of months, just recently left behind like old mammoth bones as our own personal glaciers finally began retreating. The bedraggled things sure didn’t look too festive anymore. Perhaps their owners could stick some Guinness cans in their branches to turn them into St. Patty’s trees.

In any event, you’d think the Neighborhood Watch would be banging at my door to sign me up, since I’d recently invited half the emergency response vehicles in the county to come visit us.

Several weeks ago, when the snow was still deep enough that you could only be halfway sure that your patio furniture was still under there somewhere, I took the dog out for her morning constitutional at about 6am, shortly after the toddler had crowed. As soon as I stepped onto the deck, I heard, “Beep beep beep beep beep,” coming from the neighbor’s house.

A moment later, I reemerged from the house in snow boots and jammies to figure out what was going on. The best detective work is always done in flannel pants.

In a few minutes, I’d determined that our neighbor’s fire alarm was going off, and either they weren’t home, or they slept wearing air-traffic-controller earmuffs.

Fortunately, they’d given me their cell phone number, so I called them and found out that they were away for the weekend.

It’s funny how when you tell someone, “Don’t worry, I don’t see any smoke billowing out of your windows,” it doesn’t really seem to stop them from worrying.

After I took a stroll through their house and couldn’t find anything wrong except the cleanliness of our own house by comparison, we decided that I should call the fire department. I got the answering machine there, so I had to call 911 for the first time in my life.

“Hi, this isn’t really an emergency, I don’t think,” I started.

A few minutes later, a cop car rolled up. I made an excellent sidekick.

“That beeping? That’s what tipped me off,” I told him.

“We should really stay out here, in case it’s carbon monoxide,” he replied, and suddenly, I was even more relieved than usual to still be alive.

A few minutes after that, a fire truck roared into their driveway. You might not realize this until you’re standing next to one, but you never really lose the awe you had as a three-year-old for fire trucks, especially if you’re still wearing your jammies.

“They’re lucky to have a neighbor like you,” one of the firemen said before heading inside, apparently not familiar with my “The Wind Will Take Care of It” leaf raking strategy.

Still, getting complimented by a firefighter felt pretty awesome, like I was a kid he’d just let borrow his hat.

“Thanks, Mister,” I almost replied.

In the end, the problem turned out to be a fire alarm that was dying, but didn’t feel like going quietly. So my vigilance didn’t actually stop anything bad from happening, but I fully expect to be invited the next time our Neighborhood Watch forms a posse.

You can let Mike Todd borrow your hat at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Awesome by omission

A colleague I’ve always respected retired this week, after forty fruitful years spent basking under fluorescent light tubes.

“Don’t worry, that will be us before you know it,” another colleague said to me, smiling.

“I sure hope so,” I replied, then immediately thought that was the most depressing thing I’d ever said. Yes, let’s just skip the next thirty years and cut right to the retirement cake, especially if it has a chocolate pudding layer.

I do envy certain aspects of retirement: freedom from worrying about professional calamities, getting to watch Judge Judy in real time and having plenty of time to spend with the people who really matter – your Facebook friends, who would like you to know that they finally rented “Inception” and didn’t see what all the fuss was about. Also, they could use your help wasting their lives in Farmville.

Retirement sounds like an awesome never-ending snow day, but the tendency to wish away all the time in-between seems unhealthy to me. Every time somebody retires, the people with long careers ahead of them make comments about being jealous. Perhaps this is just polite small talk, but if not, this sentiment is the saddest thing since the ending of Old Yeller, which I’ve never seen, but I have on good account that it was the saddest thing to have happened since 1957.

If young people are unhappy now and wanting to fast forward to their mid-to-late-sixties, it might just be Facebook’s fault. My wife Kara and I recently read an article that said Facebook is making us all miserable by making everyone else look so happy. Since people only post pictures that show themselves having a fabulous time, we assume that everyone else’s life is more fun than our own. People with toddlers are especially susceptible to this phenomenon, since they are far more likely to have recently suffered an exploding diaper incident, which makes everyone else’s pictures from Paris look that much more awesome by comparison.

That article got me thinking about how my life would appear to someone who only saw the pictures I posted online, which mostly feature our son Evan doing something adorable or our dog Memphis romping through the snow.

A few nights ago, exhausted from caring for a toddler with an ear infection and mild bronchitis, Kara and I pulled up the covers and turned out the lights, collapsing into the pillows.

“Finally, some rest,” I thought. Just as I was losing consciousness, I heard the sound of a bubbling cauldron. In a moment, I snapped awake, realizing that the cauldron was in our room, and it was our dog’s stomach. I opened my eyes just in time to see the silhouette of Memphis barfing in our doorway.

The regular reader(s) of this space might note that Memphis also barfed in last week’s column. If this is becoming something of a recurring theme, it is only because I am just now beginning to understand the full power of the ancient Sicilian curse: “May your dog have a sensitive stomach. And also, may your toddler throw the vast majority of his food on the floor.”

As I stumbled into the kitchen to retrieve some paper towels and carpet cleaner, I didn’t take a single picture, making our lives seem that much more awesome by omission.

To give the world a more accurate sense of our lives, after taking some pictures of Evan holding his mommy’s hand and laughing, I’d also need to take a picture of him screaming and arching his back so that I can’t fasten the car seat straps across his chest. It’s just that it’s really tough to get a good clear shot with all that struggling going on.

You can fast forward past this column at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Less splish, more splash

Becoming a maid man

“That’s it, I’m calling a maid service,” my wife Kara threatened as she surveyed the wreckage where our living room probably was. I couldn’t be exactly sure which room we were standing in, since most of our home’s distinguishing characteristics were obscured by colorful plastic objects that sing cheerfully when you stub your toe on them.

“Go ahead and call them,” I said, “But then we’ll have to cut back on our chauffeur’s annual bonus.”

We have this discussion every couple of weeks, ever since our friends recommended a maid service that they’d hired to clean their house before a party. We hired the same service last summer, before our son Evan’s first birthday party, and the experience changed Kara forever.

“You mean, we can abdicate our responsibilities as adults and just pay someone else to clean up the messes we make? This is awesome!” she thought, or something like that.

I think my basic problem with the whole idea (besides the cost, which is my actual problem) is that it seems like a confession that we can’t handle things on our own. When you grow up, you have three basic responsibilities: overpay for cable; remember yourself as a much more attractive twenty-something than you actually were; and if you can’t find any decent YouTube clips to watch, clean up after yourself.

Now every so often, when I’m getting a little too comfortable exercising my self-given right to live happily in squalor, Kara will bring up the maid service, knowing that she’s pitting my sloth against my stinginess. Nobody wants to pay for the privilege of leaving their empty yogurt cups on the couch; living in filth is only fun if you can do it for free.

Of course, even if we did hire the service again, we’d have to clean the house before the maids came over anyway, like the bi-annual flossing you do before going to the dentist.

“We just need someone to give the place a good scrub down,” Kara said. “They do a better job than we do, and they dust everything, too.”

“That’s ridiculous. We do a fine job, and dusting is a chore for people who have officially run out of things to do,” I said, blowing across the top of the credenza to make my point. The resulting dust cloud shut down local air traffic for the afternoon.

Keeping the place tidy would at least be conceivable if we didn’t have a dog and a toddler for housemates.

Last week, Evan sat in his high chair, catapulting applesauce across the kitchen while saying, “Nono, nono! Nono!”

“Where did you get ‘nono’ from, buddy?” I asked. Has there ever been a toddler who learned to say “yes” first?

Just then, our dog Memphis began doing her heaving dance, the one she performs shortly before barfing on the most expensive piece of carpet she can find.

“No no no no no no!” I yelled, throwing the sliding glass door open and pushing the dog out into the snow, but it was too late. Perhaps it should have served as some small consolation that the Mystery of the Missing Crayon was solved at the exact moment that the dog barfed cadet blue on my foot. Or maybe it was periwinkle.

“Nono,” Evan said, smiling.

It’s a wonder Memphis still hangs out with me. If someone threw me into the freezing cold while I was heaving and retching, I’d have a hard time snuggling up to them later. But she trotted back inside without a care and went straight to the spot on the counter where we keep her treats.

When I held out a biscuit, she looked at up me as if to ask, “Got anything in a burnt umber?”

You can make Mike Todd sparkle at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Treading on thick ice

We’ve finally hit the exact week in winter where the cabin fever has become so severe that I’m tempted to escape from our house by running through the living room wall like the Kool-Aid pitcher. I’d do it, too, but the living room wall just leads into the kitchen, so I’m still tweaking that plan.

All around us, you can see signs of captivity-induced insanity beginning to set in. Last weekend, I saw a neighborhood kid riding a bike around his front yard, on top of a foot of snow. The horrible layer of ice that has otherwise prevented any fun from happening since mid-January kept him from falling through, but I still expected him to vanish at any moment, the way our dog occasionally does when she’s out for a pee.

I have to give credit to the dog for remaining housebroken through this winter. If I fell through the floor every time I stepped into the bathroom, the dining room carpet would start to look pretty inviting.

“Finally, it’s not so cold out here,” I thought last week, standing on the deck in a sweater, waiting for Memphis to return from her visit to the permafrost powder room. Upon re-entering the house, I checked the weather app on my iPod to see how warm it had gotten. It was 13 degrees outside. I rebooted the iPod only to get the same response, which clearly indicated that between me and the iPod, there was some fried circuitry somewhere.

Our toddler Evan has taken to hanging out in the laundry room, the final frontier in a house in which he has drained every single object of its entertainment potential, from Potato Heads to dish towels. For us, this is a welcome reprieve from his frolicking in the dog’s water bowl, which he treats like his own personal Wildwater Kingdom.

Another discovery he’s made recently is the TV. My wife Kara and I have tried to keep him away from it for as long as we could, but during these long winter weekends, much like Simon and Garfunkle’s boxer, there were times when we were so strung out, we took some comfort there. “There” being Sesame Street, of course.

I’m impressed with how little Sesame Street has changed since I was a kid. It’s a little funkier and the effects are better, but the idea’s the same. The biggest change is the appropriation of almost the entire show by Elmo, who is, from what I understand, the love child of Grover and a Snuggie.

“Don’t worry. You just sit back and relax. Elmo will raise your child for you. Ha ha ha!” he says, in our minds.

Big Bird, who used to be the star of Sesame Street, is lucky if gets a cameo anymore. In the dressing room after the show, I picture Elmo tapping Big Bird on the shoulder and saying, “Elmo ruined your career! Ha ha ha.”

Kara and I are well aware that allowing your kid to watch too much TV during the first couple of years increases their chances of having ADD down the road, but we’re not sure what the implications are if your child already has the attention span of a goldfish.

“Hey, look Evan, they’re all learning how awesome sharing can be,” I’ll say, not noticing that I’m the only one still watching the show, and Evan is in the kitchen, putting the remote control in the recycle bin.

In any event, the most recent forecasts show that we might soon have the chance to emerge from the indoors, rubbing our eyes and breathing in air that doesn’t make our respective nostrils freeze together. If not, the next column might be brought to you by the number 1,000, which is how many miles south we’ll be moving.

You can fully winterize Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

The sniffling, sneezing, so you can rest column

Everyone talks about Nyquil as if it’s the most powerful drug you can buy without first consulting a doctor or the bad neighbor kid, so I was expecting that I’d either be comatose by now or running naked down the hallway, swatting at mosquitoes that aren’t really there.

Unfortunately, I’m still conscious and maintaining whatever grip on reality I could previously claim. I usually don’t even bother with taking over-the-counter medicine, since whining seems to be just as effective, and much more cost-effective. But this time, I’m willing to try anything, even if it costs five bucks for a pack of twelve near-placebos.

Do you remember when Cash for Clunkers was going on, and they’d pour liquid glass into old cars’ engines to make sure nobody could ever drive them again? Someone has done that to my head.

“Babe, you’re snoring again. Can you go sleep in the guest room?” my wife Kara said last night. Lest she be accused of lacking in sympathy, her head has also been clunkered for the past few days, and it does make sense for the snorer to be the one to take his blankie and his respiratory cacophony elsewhere.

Snoring is a proud tradition among the men in my family, one that thankfully skips over me when my cranial ductwork is functioning. If the situation doesn’t improve soon, though, I might wind up like other snorers in my family, who have to strap pointy cushions to their backs to keep them from rolling over in their sleep. If you ever see one of these Todd men heading to bed after donning their anti-snoring cushion, now you’ll understand why they look like a sleepy stegosaurus.

I was hoping I’d feel a little more festive today, since this is the sixth anniversary of the birth of this column. I suppose that would make it a birthday, not an anniversary, but the point remains that it is indeed possible to write 312 columns without dispensing a single fact or useful piece of advice.

While the vast majority of these columns have been produced shortly after their respective deadlines have passed, the only deadline I ever flubbed altogether happened on the day my son Evan was born, which I vividly recall because I had a really good round of Assassin’s Creed II going that day.

It’s funny how six years doesn’t even sound like that much time anymore. To a ten-year-old, being sixteen is an unimaginably distant future. As you age, though, time accelerates, so that if you put a Mama Celeste pizza in the microwave on your thirty-third birthday, you’ll be forty before the cheese melts.

It might not seem like that much time has passed, but there have been a lot of changes since I started writing this column, mainly that my bald spot has gone from DEFCON 5 to DEFCON 1. I always thought DEFCON 5 was the worst place to be, but Wikipedia informs me that DEFCON 1 is actually the worst, 5 is the best. Remember that the next time you’re the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

From what I understand of the demographics of my readership, if you’re reading these words, there’s a very good chance that you gave birth to me, married me or spent your childhood giving me wedgies. Even if you’re not one of these people, the very fact that your eyeballs are here is the main reason that this column has survived, and I sincerely thank you.

I’d also like to thank all the editors over the years who have done me the twin favors of dispensing wonderful advice while maintaining generously low standards. I’ve greatly enjoyed my time here, and I understand how lucky I am to have had it.

Also, this will be my final column. Not really, but it felt like the ending needed to be punched up a little.

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

A flurry of wintry thoughts

At some point, it’s only natural to wonder how you’re going to attach a snorkel to your dog’s face. As the snow continues to pile up in our yard, every pee break for Memphis is becoming more of an adventure, with her nose just poking up above the surface. Another couple of inches and she’ll have to burrow her way out there like Bugs Bunny, popping up in the neighbor’s yard and saying, “Eh, I knew I shoulda taken that left turn at Albuquerque.”

Somehow, even in the midst of the most snow-whomping winter in memory, I find myself rooting for more snow, even though the results are decidedly against my own interests. When you’re a kid, your brain gets wired to think that snow equals freedom and awesomeness, and a rewiring can only occur after several decades of snowfall yielding nothing but traffic jams and herniated disks.

It’s been slightly more difficult to greet the unceasing snow with a childlike enthusiasm lately, since our son’s daycare shuts down when the schools do, forcing my wife Kara and I to work from home in a blur of snow shovels, teleconferences, laptops and Matchbox car derbies. Have you ever tried to get in a full day’s work while chasing after a 19-month-old who refuses to be entertained by PowerPoint presentations? It’s not easy, but Kara and I manage to get by, mostly because we pass Evan back-and-forth all day, playing our own version of hot potoddler.

Whenever snow is forecast during the day, I can count on looking out onto our parking lot at work and seeing half of the cars with their windshield wipers pointed in the air. If I’m not mistaken, this is a relatively new phenomenon. Nobody used to do this. Ten years ago, when I was a student at Penn State, you’d see oceans of cars parked before a blizzard without a single windshield wiper reaching for the sky, probably because lifting your wiper there would have caused all of your parking tickets to flutter into the bushes.

The first time I saw the windshield wiper trick done, I thought, “Hey, that’s a great idea! It must make cleaning off your car so much easier.”

The next time we had snow in the forecast, I proudly raised my windshield wipers before heading into work. That evening, I returned to my car after several inches had fallen. Imagine my surprise when cleaning off the car turned out to be zero percent easier.

I have since run the same experiment in different types of winter storms, and have collected enough data to be fairly certain that putting your windshield wipers up before a storm serves no purpose except to say, “Look at me, everyone! I knew it was gonna snow!”

Which is perhaps better than some be-bowtied weathermen could do, but still seems hardly worth the effort.

In any event, this winter isn’t showing too many signs of letting up on us anytime soon, with more storms in the forecast and Jack Frost continuing to nip indiscriminately. This is great news for kids who didn’t do their homework, but even better news for global warming deniers, who can spend all day posting Internet comments to the effect that even though NASA reported 2010 as the warmest year in recorded history, snow in the Northeast proves that Al Gore was wrong. And also fat.

Even with the pummeling we’ve endured so far this winter, somehow, each time the snow stops falling, I get a little disappointed, partly because the backbreaking manual labor begins shortly after the last flake flutters to a stop, but mostly because being a child with a sled ruined my brain.

You can kick Mike Todd out of your snow fort at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Sometimes, forgettable is good

“Well, at least tonight has been memorable,” I said. “Most Saturday nights just turn into a blur of pizza boxes and Netflix envelopes, but not this one, right?”

“Uuuuugh,” my wife Kara replied. She said something after that, too, but I couldn’t quite make it out, partly because she wasn’t enunciating, but mostly because her head was inside the toilet bowl, which apparently has very poor acoustic projection.

I couldn’t stick around to chat anyway, since our toddler Evan was busy in his crib doing his best impersonation of Linda Blair from The Exorcist, but without the head-spinning. At least I imagine that’s what the scene from The Exorcist would have looked like, if I was dumb enough to watch that movie. I handle horror movies about as well as anybody, as long as anybody doesn’t sleep for three days afterwards.

We were managing to put on a pretty good horror show of our own last Saturday night, light on the gore but heavy on the splatter.

It was all my fault. I had recently asked the question: “Did you ever notice that Evan never throws up anymore?”

“Don’t say that. You’re tempting fate,” Kara replied.

Turns out, Kara was right. I had put a rhetorical slice of moist strawberry cheesecake right in front of Fate, and Fate was very tempted.

“Oh, I really shouldn’t,” said Fate. “But what the heck. Just this once.”

And so our house was blighted with a 24-hour bug that took out two-thirds of its human occupants, sparing only me, perhaps because I was gracious enough to invite it in.

It’s a strange phenomenon, when everyone around you gets sick but you don’t. You know you didn’t do anything to deserve it, but you still feel kind of cool, which is how it must feel to win a Grammy.

Before witnessing the carnage last Saturday, I thought 24-hour bugs sounded delightful. Only 24 hours? Whenever I’ve gotten sick as an adult, the symptoms seemed to last longer than the Crusades, and I’d gladly have taken a condensed version instead. But now that I’ve seen a 24-hour bug in action, I think I’ll stick with the slow-burning kind that doesn’t turn its hosts into biological geysers.

If we had to guess where Evan and Kara picked up the bug, the safest bet would be the toddler playland where we took Evan earlier in the weekend.

“We’re taking Evan to a bouncy castle place,” Kara said to her mom over the phone.

“Oooh, those places are full of germs,” her mom replied, and Kara passed that information along to me.

“Aw, c’mon, germs are nothing to be afraid of,” I said, hours before the projectile vomiting began.

The thing is, I’m pretty sure Evan would still do the entire weekend over again. He spent hours inside the toddlers’ bounce house, laughing, screaming and running full tilt into the walls. That’s pretty much what he does at home anyway, but it turns out to be much more fun when the walls are inflatable.

By the time we left, he’d had so much fun that I think he would gladly sign up for another severe gastrointestinal event to do it all again. But if it does all happen again, I think we’ll either swear off bouncy castles forever or put Evan inside a giant hamster ball before rolling him across the drawbridge.

The next morning, everyone was feeling better, and our house had the slow, moaning and groaning vibe of a frat house after a great party. Kara and I had just survived the kind of night that you know you’re signing up for when you become a parent, and which gradually becomes part of family lore. Most importantly, though, we learned that having a night to remember is best left for people without kids.

You can dump sawdust on Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

A real pain in the can

As gasoline rained down upon my person and belongings last week, I began to imagine the conversation that must have taken place at the meeting where the new style of portable gas can was developed.

“Hey, let’s design a new kind of no-spill gas can!” someone must have said.

“Boooorrrr-iiiiiiing. How about we make one that shoots gasoline straight up in the air? You know. For some reason,” someone else replied.

“Good idea! That’s exactly what we’ll do,” said their boss, as soon as his keg stand was finished.

If you have recently filled up a lawn mower or snow blower with a gas can purchased in the last few years, you’ll know what I’m talking about. You’re also probably reading this by yourself, since you reek of gasoline. Maybe these cans are doing us all a favor, since someday gas will be so expensive that reeking of it will be a status symbol, like driving a car that wastes it.

I first became acquainted with the new style of gasoline splatterer in our old house, when I went to fill up our mower with the can that my wife Kara had just purchased. As soon as I put the nozzle into the mower and let the weight of the can gently open the spout, gas began ricocheting in all directions, putting on a fountain show to rival the Bellagio.

“This is what happens when a woman buys a gas can,” I said, in my head, because saying sexist things out loud is not very smart, especially when you’re drenched in a highly combustible liquid.

I set out to find a can that worked like the one in my parents’ garage, which has spilled perhaps three drops of gas between 1981 and 2011. It was then that I realized Kara hadn’t made a poor purchasing decision. A conspiracy was afoot. Home Depot, Lowe’s, Sears – they only stocked the cans that looked identical to the one I already had, the kind that must be very popular with self-immolation enthusiasts.

It occurred to me last week, when I went to fire up our snow blower to clear a foot of snow off the driveway, that after six years of near-weekly use, I still haven’t figured out how to execute a refueling without turning the garage into a Superfund site.

Incidentally, whatever happened to 4 to 8 inches of snow? That’s what we always got when I was a kid. These days, it’s either a dusting or a foot. Mother Nature doesn’t do nuance like she used to.

“You know, they design the cans that way now so they’ll pollute less,” my friend Sergey explained after a recent refueling-fueled tirade.

“No, don’t tell me that. I just want to complain about them without knowing any of their good points,” I said, echoing my feelings about people who disagree with me politically.

As it turned out, Sergey was right. The new cans are designed to be ventless, so they don’t sit around emitting all over the place like your relatives on Thanksgiving. In fact, according to an EPA website, “reduced evaporation from these containers will result in gasoline savings over the life of the container that will more than offset the increased cost for the container.”

While I can certainly get behind the theory of Earth-friendly gasoline cans, I wonder if the implementation couldn’t be accomplished with a design that’s less likely to treat my garage like the Gulf of Mexico. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot innovation going on in this space, though, so I’m only holding my breath because I stink like gas.

Perhaps I can take some solace in the fact that the new cans emit 78% less benzene, which sounds like a good thing, and also suggests that I should find a new breakfast cereal to replace my Benzene-Os.

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