Local warming

“It’s here!  It’s here!” I yelled, nose pressed against the window.

Our dog Memphis went berserk barking, which is what she does to alert us to things we already know about.  It’s an annoying habit, but at least it comes from a good place.  A good, stupid place.

This time, at least she was right that something was happening: oil delivery day was finally here.  Oil delivery day is when a big tanker truck beeps backwards down your driveway, hooks a hose to the side of your house, and sucks all the money out.  As homeowners, it’s a day we generally greet with mixed emotions, because even as the oil delivery makes us poorer, it also allows my wife Kara to keep the thermostat set to broil.

Last week, though, the truck wasn’t just delivering oil.  It was delivering the results of our big experiment.

“I keep my thermostat set to the same temperature all winter long.  It’s much more efficient than bringing the heat up and down,” a heating guy told us many years ago, convincing us not to bother programming our thermostats. 

For years afterwards, we continued not to bother.  In retrospect, taking oil-conservation advice from the heating guy that the oil company recommended is much like taking dieting advice from a nutritionist that Krispy Kreme recommended. 

“Oh, your body doesn’t notice the calories if you cover them in glaze first.  Also, did you know that lard is the new kale?”

For the last several winters, our house has been guzzling oil like a Louisiana pelican, so we decided to try a few different things this year.  I put insulated covers under our attic fan and over our pull-down attic stairs.  The regular reader(s) of this column may also recall that we recently installed a Nest learning thermostat, the only thermostat clinically proven to get people to spend $250 on a thermostat.

Nest recently made headlines when Google paid 3.2 billion dollars for it, which probably means that pretty soon, to turn the temp up a few degrees, we’ll have to join Google+, the social network you join when you need some alone time.   

After making these improvements, I hoped that we would put a dent in our heating bills, but we wouldn’t have any solid data until our next delivery.  We’re usually at work when the oil truck sidles up to our house, but a stroke of good fortune enabled us to be home this time: A virulent stomach bug had struck our kids’ daycare, sickening most of the kids, teachers and parents, including our whole family. 

Say what you will about violent gastrointestinal distress, but I lost four pounds in two days, almost cancelling out my holiday indiscretions.  If you’re looking for a great crash diet, just stop by our kids’ daycare and lick a few toys.  You’ll be ready for the cover of Cosmo by the end of the week.  Better get there soon, though, before this epidemic subsides and the next one begins.  Show up a day too late and you’ll probably just get pinkeye instead. 

As the oil truck pulled away, I ran outside in my slippers to grab the receipt the driver had hung on our garage door.  The bill showed the smallest delivery we’d had in at least two years, about 20% below average.  Of course, the sample size was still too small to know for sure if any of our changes had really made a difference.  It could have been a fluke.

“Dude!  The oil bill is smaller!  It wasn’t a fluke!  We rule!” I said, in triumph, to the inside of the toilet. 

Sometimes, you have to take your victories where you can get them.

You can insulate yourself from Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Choosy dads don’t exist

It was early in the morning, too early for big news.  But I braced myself anyway, since the news was coming whether I was awake enough for it or not.

“Big news,” said the yogurt box, “for moms who love the wholesome goodness of GoGurt Simple.”

I turned the box around in my hands, looking for big news that might interest dads, to no avail.  Was I supposed to get my wife Kara out of the shower, since I’d intercepted an important message meant only for her? 

“Dude, who’s making the lunches around here?” I said out loud, shaking the sexist yogurt box. 

“More!” said our 21-month-old son Zack from his high chair, pointing at the place where his toaster waffle used to be. 

“More what?” I asked him, being purposefully (for once) obtuse.  We’ve been trying to encourage Zack to use more words than the four now in his vocabulary.  The problem is that the four words he’s chosen can convey pretty much everything.  They are: “More,” “that,” “no” and “cookie.”  Even now, I’m trying to think of a life situation where those four words wouldn’t be sufficient to navigate to a successful conclusion, and I’m drawing a blank.  You could probably turn on C-SPAN right now and watch an entire debate made up of only those words.

“That!” the distinguished gentleman from Tennessee would yell, pointing to a pie chart.

“More!” half the room would scream, nodding.

 “No!” the other half would yell, throwing papers into the air.

Then, from the back row, someone would yell, “COOOOK-IEEEEEE!” and they’d break for lunch.

If Zack was our first son, we’d probably be charting his verbal progress against his peers, recording his percentiles and stressing out when he reached a milestone a week later than he should.  But he’s our second kid, which means as long as he’s still running into coffee tables headfirst like he’s supposed to, we’re good.

I waved another toaster waffle in the air to cool it off.

“That!” Zack said.

I put the kids’ PB&J sandwiches into their lunch boxes, thinking of the applicable peanut butter slogan, the full version of which goes something like: “Choosy moms choose Jif, while Dad sits on the couch with his hand down his pants.”  There’s also the breakfast cereal with the related slogan: “Kid tested, mother approved.  Dad’s in the bathroom -- leave him alone.”

Someone should alert these companies that sometimes, dads also play an active role in their kids’ lives.  Sure, it’s mostly by teaching them which body functions to laugh at, but still.

“Want to go wake up your big brother?” I asked Zack.

He nodded and ran for the stairs.  In Evan’s room, we gently rousted him by having certain waffle-wielding members of our party dive onto his head.  While I feel for Evan being rudely awoken by my henchman every day, there’s a certain poetic justice to it all.  We’ll be even after about 7 million more roustings.

“Everything okay?” Kara asked, dressed for work, her makeup and blouse contrasting with my morning breath and flannel.

“They’re all yours,” I said.  Like tag-team wrestlers, we high-fived and switched places.  Her turn in the ring, my turn to get presentable.  

“Oh, there’s some big news waiting for you downstairs.  Something about artificial flavors,” I said, heading for the shower.

She started to ask what I was talking about, but then one of the wrestlers from the opposing team hit her with a folding chair.  Or maybe it was a request for help getting dressed.  Either way, Dad’s in the bathroom – leave him alone.

You can verify what’s in Mike Todd’s brown bag at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Dog days of winter

“Please, no, not the filet mignon,” was the only thought in my mind as I scrambled across my in-laws' living room.

My sister-in-law Jill had sounded the alarm moments earlier.

“No, Memphis!” she yelled as she leapt from the couch, and I knew something serious was happening, on account of all the yelling and running around.  When you’re a perceptive student of body language, you can glean important information from a gesture as simple as someone waving their hands over their head, screaming and hurdling the coffee table.

“What’s going on?” my mother-in-law called from the kitchen.

As I hustled to join the commotion, I saw Memphis’ paws sliding off the dining room table and her head disappearing beneath it.  Jill and I converged on my dog from opposite sides of the table.  The wine, already poured, vibrated in the fancy glasses like the T-rex from Jurassic Park was joining us for dinner.

Up until that moment, Memphis had been the good dog in the house, a rare position for her.  My wife’s other sister, Sarah, had brought her sweet, mild-mannered golden retriever, Jackson, on a road trip from Virginia Beach.  On their first night in the house, Jackson had a bit of an upset tummy, which, when mixed with his formerly harmless predilection for spinning in circles while relieving himself, resulted in my in-laws’ finished basement turning into a piece of artwork that looked like a collaboration between the Marquis de Sade and Jackson Pollock.

“Do you have any more paper towels?” Sarah asked as she emerged from the basement after the third round of cleaning.

“Do we need to call ServPro?” my mother-in-law asked, invoking the name of the company that guts your house after disaster strikes, and setting a new bar for gauging the success of a holiday get-together.  If your hosts don’t need to call ServPro after you leave, it’s been a successful visit.  (In the end, paper towels, carpet cleaner and active suppression of the gag reflex turned out to be sufficient to remediate Jackson’s dabbling in the art world, so this visit easily cleared the ServPro bar.)

While our somewhat high-strung Memphis might generally have suffered from a direct comparison to a healthy Jackson, for this particular visit, all she had to do was not destroy anything, like, say, a fancy meal to celebrate the rare coming together of four geographically dispersed families (or one big family, depending on how you count it).

As I dove headfirst toward Memphis, fearing that she'd just consumed the dinner my father- and mother-in-law had spent many days preparing, I wondered if somewhere inside that tiny canine brain, Memphis' life was flashing before her eyes.  Because it should have been.

“What does she have?” I yelled, sliding onto the floor and putting Memphis in a headlock.  Memphis chewed with renewed vigor, sensing that her meal was coming to a close.

“Oh man,” Jill replied, looking at the half-eaten platter on the table.

I reached into Memphis’ mouth and scooped out as much as I could with my fingers, denying her what remained of her ill-gotten gains.

“It’s the pumpkin bread,” Jill said, helpfully identifying the glop in my hands.  I breathed a sigh of relief.  A side dish.  It was only a side dish.  Life would go on. 

In the post-debacle review, we determined that Memphis had eaten somewhere between 3 and 8 pieces.  There were still some apparently untouched pieces on the platter, and they left them on the table so we wouldn’t feel bad, but you’d be surprised how little space everyone had on their plates for pumpkin bread.  Those mashed potatoes really needed some elbow room.

Next time we visit, we’ll have to call first to make sure their house is still a pet-friendly establishment.

You can dive on Mike Todd and scoop out whatever’s in his mouth at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Stripping isn’t for everyone

**BWOOOP!  BWOOP!! Rerun alert!  Rerun alert!  This one's from 2008.  I hope your 2014 is off to a great start, and we'll pick up next week with some non-plagiarized-from-myself material.**

After spending the past week stripping wallpaper from our kitchen, I have become something of an involuntary expert on the subject. If you’re considering taking on such a project, the best advice I can offer is to throw out all your old scrapers, scorers and steamers. You’d be surprised how much easier it is when you decide to just douse the wallpaper with kerosene, set it ablaze and rebuild.

Of course, you may decide you’d rather do things the hard way, actually removing the wallpaper without destroying the house around it. I haven’t figured out how to do that yet. People will tell you wild stories, passed down through the generations, of wallpaper that just pulls off, like you’re unpeeling a giant floral banana. This type of wallpaper probably exists in places where the streets are paved with gumdrops, but in the real world, the average sheet of wallpaper has been applied with more paste than resides in the collective digestive system of our nation’s kindergartners.

We should have known what we were getting into. A few years ago, we rented a steamer from Home Depot to remove some small pink borders in our old house, thinking that, worst case, it would take about an hour to take them all down. We slid head first into the rental department twenty-four hours later, exhausted and totally steamed.

Maybe we felt cocky this time around because we had our very own steamer. Turns out that, while it costs about forty bucks to rent a steamer for the day, you can buy one outright for fifty. Also, buying two four-piece McNuggets off the dollar menu is cheaper than buying a single six-piece. I’m afraid I just told you everything useful I’ve ever learned.

Before steaming a wall, you have to go over every inch with a scoring tool that pokes tiny holes in the paper. Never has so much scoring produced so little fun. But at least my wife Kara bribed me with food to get the job done. “I’ll cook if you strip,” she said.  Apparently, I will strip for food.  I didn’t know that about myself.

Our steamer had this orange label stuck to it: “WARNING: This machine produces live steam and/or scalding hot water which could cause severe bodily injury.” I think it should have been a guarantee instead of a warning (never mind the ethical implications of bringing steam to life). After I started attempting to take the wallpaper down, I realized that I was giving myself burns of various degrees.  I’m pretty sure that my wedding ring is now soldered to my finger.

When I mentioned this to some of my married friends, I found out that other guys take their rings off when they’re performing manual labor. That seems like it’s breaking a sacred trust. You should only take your wedding ring off when it’s absolutely necessary, like when you want to spin it like a top on a restaurant table or flip it like a coin as you walk over a storm drain.

My buddy Allen explained to me that he never takes his ring off because, “If you wear through your wedding band, that means you’re free.”

I don’t know about that, but I do know that it’s probably a whole lot easier to just decide that you like having a million repeating berries and flowers plastered around your kitchen than to actually do something about it. Why anyone has put up wallpaper since the invention of paint, I just can’t understand.

But the universe must stay in balance.  For every sheet that comes down, one must go up.  Yin and yang, steamers and paste.  Somewhere, somebody is putting up wallpaper right now.  Just hopefully not in a place that you or I will ever live.

You can steam Mike Todd off your walls at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Not the brightest Christmas bulb

It took a few moments for the realization to hit that the Christmas lights beside my foot were blinking off and on, even though they weren’t the kind of lights that do that.

My eyes followed the strand behind me, to the wall, where our 18-month-old son Zack stood, merrily plugging and unplugging the lights.

“Dude, Mommy’s going to kill me if she sees you doing that.  Also, it’s not safe,” I explained, trading him a bouncy ball for the lights.  Taking something from a toddler without giving anything in return is like taking a bone from a strange dog.  It might go just fine, or you might lose a finger.

I took the safety plug off the window sill and stuck in back into the outlet.  Zack watched, then pried the safety plug back out and handed it to me.  I looked in my hand and realized that this two-pronged piece of plastic was not a child safety device after all.  It was simply an adult inconveniencing device.     

“If Mommy sees him doing what?” my wife Kara asked, coming back into the room with a warm cup of her favorite tea, called Chamomile Nights, which could double as the title of the most boring romance novel ever. 

“Oh, Harrison, I feel so soothed, I could just put on full-length flannel pajamas and sleep all night,” the heroine would yawn. 

“Nothing.  You find the honey for your tea?” I asked.  In a moment of weakness, we’d bought a little squeeze bottle of local honey from a nearby farm for nine bucks, about three times what it would have cost to buy grocery store honey from faraway bees in countries with relaxed regulations on larva labor.

“No, it completely vanished,” Kara replied.  We’d never see that bottle of honey again, but we did get a clue about what may have happened to it about a week later, when Kara caught Zack dropping her wallet into the kitchen trash can.       

I unrolled another strand of last year’s Christmas lights and plugged it in.  Half of them came on, half of them shrieked, “Bah, humbug!” and stayed dark.

“That’s not right,” I said, looking at the box they came in.

“If one or more bulbs burns [sic, I think] out, others stay lighted,” the box proudly proclaimed.

At first, I thought the lights weren’t functioning as designed, but then I read the carefully worded message again.  It didn’t say how many others would stay lighted.  It just said others.  If I assumed that meant ALL others, well, that’s my faulty interpretation.

“Isn’t that being a little deceptive?” asked an intern in the conference room where the box was being designed.

“You’re fired.  Which means half of you are fired,”    the boss said, dividing the room with his arm and pointing toward the door.

My dad can fix anything.  He’s spent a great deal of his life with his head under cupboards, inside engines and between floor joists, swearing at things until they worked again.

“How do you fix a strand of Christmas lights?” I asked him over the phone.

“Easy.  Throw it out and buy a new one,” he said. 

Several years ago, I wrote that if the universe were a just place, when an overhead light bulb burned out in the factory where they manufacture Christmas lights, the entire factory would go dark until they figured out which bulb it was.  I’d like to amend that now to say they should just burn down the factory.

In any event, we’re ready for Christmas around here.  Our lights are now strung, and our children, though amped up, remain at the proper voltage.  No thanks to our outlet covers.   
   
You can get half-lit with Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Deck the halls with rubber serpents

“The only way you’re getting out of here is with me.  Let’s make this easy on both of us,” I said.  The door clicked shut behind me.  I inched into the room, hoping I’d pushed my fear down far enough that it wasn’t showing. 

My quarry pondered my words for a moment.  We locked eyes.  A tense silence filled the room.   A tumbleweed blew across the carpet between us.  Or was it a dust bunny?

Then, to let me know how easy he intended to make this on both of us, my quarry relieved himself on my wife’s dresser.  Then he launched headfirst into the ceiling, flapping and bonking his head over and over.

“Hey, could you just hold still for a minute?” I said, ducking as he swooped past.  The rational part of your brain knows that a little wren can’t possibly hurt you, but still, when one is flying around your bedroom, you really have to fight the urge to shriek and crawl someplace where the likelihood of a winged creature landing on your face drops to zero.

Each time the bird stopped to rest, I’d step slowly closer, only to flinch and take a blind swipe with my son’s miniature butterfly net as it flew past.

I may not be great at wren wrangling yet, but this wasn’t my first bird rodeo.  The bird entered the house the same way they always do: by riding on the wreath that hangs on our front door.  When the door swings open, the bird takes flight and boom!  Instant involuntary aviary.

Every year, we forget that this happens.  We merrily hang the wreath on our door, dooming ourselves to another run-in with a cute little winged menace.

“There’s a bird in the house.  He came in when I opened the door to let the dog out,” my wife Kara reported last week.

The last time this happened, I fashioned a crude net out of a trash bag, a garden rake, a coat hanger and some duct tape.  This time, I had a secret weapon: a four-year-old son.

“Evan, I need your butterfly net.  Do you know where it is?” I asked.

“I do!” Evan replied, taking a diving leap into a giant pile of colorful plastic paraphernalia in our toy room (formerly known as the living room), disappearing entirely, except for his feet.

When he emerged with the net, it wasn’t quite the size I’d remembered.  It looked more like a net you’d use to scoop a goldfish out of an aquarium.  

I thanked Evan for the net and followed the wren upstairs, down the hall and into our bedroom, where our final showdown would take place.

From my nightstand, the bird looked at me with his beak open slightly, as if he wanted to speak.  I looked back at him, and in this pause from our surface-to-air combat, we shared a moment.  The bird communicated with me.

“Dude, stop chasing me,” he communicated.

The one thing I’ve learned: If you chase a wren long enough, it will get tired.  It will get sloppy.  It will make mistakes.  Eventually, it will just sit there and say, “I’m pretty sure you’re going to eat me, but whatever.”

After a few more passes around the room, the bird sat still long enough for me to drop the goldfish net over his head and slide a piece of cardboard underneath.

“We really need to figure out how to keep this from happening again,” I said as the wren chirped at us from a tree in the front yard.        

Kara read online that putting rubber snakes in your wreath will keep the birds out.  We deployed our secret weapon to find some toy snakes in the rubble.

This is all a long way of explaining to our neighbors: Yes, that is a rubber snake you see in our wreath.  No, we don’t celebrate Halloween and Christmas simultaneously, unless you count the leftover Jolly Ranchers we’re still working through. 

You can wrangle wreath wrens with Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

We’re going on a moose hunt

“Seriously?  These scavenger hunts are getting way too difficult,” my sister-in-law Jill replied after we delivered our latest request.  Jill had become a victim of her own success.  Like the child in the old Shel Silverstein poem, if she’d just broken a few dishes, maybe we wouldn’t have asked her to dry the dishes anymore.

“There’s a statue of Granite the sled dog somewhere in the Alaska Regional Hospital.  Can you find it and take a picture?” we’d asked a few months ago, back when our requests were still somewhat reasonable.  Our son Evan had read about Granite, apparently the awesomest dog in the history of the Iditarod, in one of his books, which featured an image of Granite’s regal statue on the back cover.  It’s a pretty impressive feat for a dog to distinguish itself enough to earn a permanent memorial.  If our dog Memphis ever earns a bronze likeness of herself, it will probably depict her running past the edge of the hardwood floor to barf on the carpet.

Three days after that request, Jill texted us a picture of the bronze pooch.  (She works at the Alaska Regional Hospital, a very helpful non-coincidence.)

“I like that picture!” Evan said, briefly appeased.  “Now can she send me a picture of a moose?”

Our family has a thing for moose.  Sure, the animals themselves are swell enough on their own, but for us, their presence has a deeper meaning: If you’re looking at one, that means you’re on vacation.  (One more solid indicator: Your last snack consisted entirely of beer and Oreos.) 

Before Aunt Jill and Uncle Kris moved to Anchorage last year, they promised Evan that they’d be his Alaskan eyes and ears.

“As soon as we see a moose, you’ll be the first to know,” Jill said. 

Granite had stayed put, making him easier to find, but the Alaskan moose were just not cooperating.  And then, one Saturday evening, my wife Kara’s cell phone announced a video chat invitation from Jill.  Kara gave the phone to Evan.  An excited, if somewhat pixilated, Aunt Jill announced, “Evan, look, there’s a moose in our yard!”

She pointed the camera out her window at the giant creature nibbling a snowy crabapple tree. 

Sometimes, I wonder if we should live in a place where cool stuff like that happens.  “Uncle Mike, can you send me a picture of a traffic jam?” is a message I’ll probably never receive.

When Jill ventured outside to get a closer look, the moose wandered off into the woods before it even got a chance to hear the door click shut behind Jill, locking her out in the Alaskan wilderness.  Well, the Alaskan wilderness of their townhouse development, which is at least 97% more wildernessy than any townhouses around here. 

“Oh, no,” she said, and we could do nothing from our end except watch, and congratulate her on her prescient decision to put on her jacket before venturing out.

Smart phones are funny things.  Beyond their primary function of helping you ignore loved ones on the other side of the couch, they can also apparently be used to connect with loved ones on the other side of the world.  What can’t these things do?  Besides unlock a front door, I mean.

After a brief intermission, Jill called back from inside her house, letting us know that her neighbor had given her back her spare key.  Evan had been looking over his moose book in the meantime.

“Aunt Jill, did you know that a moose’s antlers fall off each year?  Can you send me a picture of a moose with just one antler?” he asked.

He might just as well have asked her to get a picture of Sarah Palin speaking at an ACLU fundraiser.

“I might have to grab a picture off the Internet and pass it off as my own,” Jill told us later.  Or maybe she should just go ahead and break a dish.
       
You can take Mike Todd for Granite at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Update: And of course, the day after I sent in this column, Uncle Kris saw a one-antlered moose, just wandering down the sidewalk.  The moose took off when Kris tried to grab a picture, but he did manage to snag this shot:

If you blow it up and look at the moose's shadow, you can see the one antler (there are also a couple lighter pixels over one side of his head).  We're counting it!  Anyone have any other good Alaska scavenger hunt ideas?  Otherwise, we'll have to run with the Sarah Palin/ACLU thing.  Jill and Kris could probably get it done.

Wren things go awry

** The regular reader(s) of this column may recognize this one from December 2008.  Sorry if this a rerun for you!  But really, if your memory is that good, you should probably be working on cold fusion or something instead of reading this blog anyway. **
 
When my buddy Derek recently opened our front door to leave after a weekend visit, a small brown bird shot into the house, flying right for my wife Kara like she was made of suet.

Kara saw the look on my face before she saw the bird.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, followed immediately by, “Aaaaaah! Is that a bat? Is that a bat?” as she flung herself off the couch and scuttled across the floor.

The aptly named house wren alighted on the lampshade that had been just over Kara’s head, then quickly made itself at home, conducting an impromptu self-guided tour of every lampshade and curtain rod in the house, mistaking each for a guest bathroom and returning the number of incontinent animals in our house to one. Apparently, housebreaking our dog Memphis had thrown the universe out of balance. We were due for a correction.

As it turned out, Kara brought this upon us. The bird had built a nest in the wreath on our front door, and it wasn’t even our Christmas wreath yet. Kara buys wreaths like rappers buy Cadillac Escalades.

“Oooh, this one would make a nice summer wreath,” she’ll say, pointing at an overpriced bundle of sticks and berries that will soon be riding home in our backseat.

Derek, Kara and I ran around the house picking up tools that we thought might be helpful for corralling the wren. Kara grabbed a blanket. Derek snagged a broom. After frantically scanning the pantry for a helpful bird-catching implement, I came back with the best thing I could find: an empty Honey Nut Cheerios box.

“Babe, a cereal box. Seriously?” Kara asked.

Unfortunately, I skimmed over the part of the Guy Handbook that explained how to remove flying animals from the house. It must have been right next to the chapter that explained why you’d ever want to change your own motor oil.

The three of us ran around the house, chasing the wren to a scene that should have been accompanied by Benny Hill music. I helped Kara toss the blanket at the bird a few times, but a moving target is really hard to hit with microfleece. In any event, if I’m ever forced to be a gladiator, remind me not to pick that throwable net as a weapon. If the blanket is any indication, I couldn’t incapacitate the broad side of a barn with one of those things.

After several passes, Derek stuck the broom right into the wren’s flight path, and the bird, dazed, flopped to floor. At that moment, Memphis, who had been altitudinally challenged enough not to have been an issue until just then, shot across the room, the thought bubble over her head clearly showing a rawhide chew toy with flapping wings.

“No, no, no!” we all screamed together as the bird hopped to its feet and ran towards the couch, with Memphis closing quickly behind.

With a head-first slide under the couch, the bird narrowly avoided the shared and shredded fate of every dog toy we’ve ever bought.

Moments later, with Memphis locked howling in the bedroom, Derek and Kara gently rocked the couch back as I crawled under with the cereal box.

“Hey!” I said.

“Did you catch it?” Kara asked.

“No, but did you know that the Honey Nut Cheerios bee is named ‘Buzz’? I don’t think I ever knew that.”

As a team, we were eventually able to coax the bird into the box, perhaps due to the large print that promised lower cholesterol. Out on the deck, the bird hopped out of the box and flew into a nearby tree, where it probably swore off wreaths forever. If only I could get Kara to do the same.

You can smack Mike Todd with your broom at mikectodd@gmail.com.

The creature in the cup holder

“There’s a worm in my cup holder!” our son Evan reported from the backseat.

I glanced in the rearview mirror, which hadn’t been pointed at the cars behind us in years, to see if he was serious.

He pointed down to indicate that this was the real deal.

“Really, like a real worm?” my wife Kara asked.  Four-year-olds are not the most reliable witnesses.  A “worm” could be anything from a worm-like piece of thread to an actual boa constrictor to nothing at all.  After all, this is the same child who recently informed us of a tiny being called the Gobbler who lives in people’s ears and nibbles their toes while they’re sleeping.

“The Gobbler is definitely real,” he said quietly, as if worried that the Gobbler would intercept the message, which he probably would, seeing as how he lives in our ears.

“Yeah, like a real worm,” Evan replied.   

Kara took off her seatbelt and leaned into the backseat to get a look. 

“Don’t crash,” she said, which is what she always says when she unclicks.  Recognizing the wisdom of her advice, I took us off the collision course with that phone pole.  In a moment, she pulled herself back into her seat to report her findings. 

“Yeah, there’s a little white worm in there with his treasures,” she said.

Evan likes to collect treasures – acorns, rocks, leaves, sticks, flowers – and stuff them into any available receptacles, including the cup holders on his car seat (let’s not get hung up on the fact that Evan’s ride has more standard features than my first car).

“Like, a fat, squat, white worm?” I asked.

“Yeah, like that,” she replied. 

“And it’s moving?” I asked.

“Yes, just wriggling a little,” she said.

She did not freak out, which led me to believe that she had not identified the creature in the cup holder.  We drove along in silence for another few moments, as I contemplated how, or whether, to break the news that Evan had a maggot in his car seat.

We don’t claim to be the neatest of people.  We often have unfolded laundry on the couch.  Dust bunnies roam our hardwood with little fear of capture.  But, up until that point, we had at least been 100% maggot-free.  A low bar, sure, but one we never expected to trip us up.

“Dude, I hate to say this, but you just described a maggot,” I said. 

Kara took the news better than I expected.

“We are disgusting people,” she replied, a fair point.

When we arrived at daycare, I took Evan’s treasures – an acorn, a shriveled berry, some pebbles, the odd maggot – and put them under a bush.

“My treasures!” Evan yelled, but he quickly recovered his composure.  Sometimes, if you love a maggot, you have to set it free.     

A couple weeks later, Evan sat in my lap as I read him some hard-hitting journalism from the latest issue of Ranger Rick, Jr, with the cover story titled “Nutty for Acorns.”  As we got caught up on the latest in acorn-related current events, I showed Evan a picture of an adult acorn weevil.  The acorn weevil, we learned, inserts its eggs into an acorn in the summer.  When the acorn falls from the tree, the baby acorn weevil chews its way out into the world.  Or, in some cases, into Evan’s cup holder.

“Babe, you’ve got to see this,” I said, handing the magazine to Kara.

“What about it?” she asked.

“We’re not disgusting!” I replied, feeling vindicated.  Sure, it was still a maggot, but it sounds so much cuter to call it a baby acorn weevil. 

I’d been blaming the shriveled-up berry all along.  The acorn, as it turned out, was the root of all weevil.

You can get some grub with Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Somebody puts baby in the corner

I paused in the doorway, deciding whether or not to make a scene.  The managers were on the far side of the restaurant, chatting to each other, not paying us any mind.

“Let’s just go,” my wife Kara said, ushering our two sons to the door.

Twenty minutes earlier, I’d asked one of the managers if they had a highchair for our 18-month-old son, Zack.

“No,” she said.

It was the way she said “no” that really stuck in my craw, assuming that a craw is a body part that can be mentioned in a family publication.  (Otherwise, it stuck in my clavicle.) 

It wasn’t an apologetic, “No, high chairs are on back order right now,” or “No, our high chair is off getting sanded and refinished after an especially zesty meatball-eating incident.”  It was just, “No, we don’t care what you do with your stinky kid, but it sure won’t be putting him in his own seat.”

Imagine eating a sandwich in an exotic outdoor café.  A hungry monkey jumps into your lap.  Every time you raise your sandwich to your mouth, the monkey screeches and bats at it, sending a shower of lettuce and cheese raining down upon its head.  This is what it’s like trying to eat with an 18-month-old in your lap, except you don’t have the luxury of shooing him away.  Also, you’re sitting in a Subway, not an exotic café, and you have to balance your child with one hand while trying to unhinge your jaw like a snake so that you can just cram the entire six inches of sandwich art into your mouth in one shot.  While chewing, you will try to fork some meatball pieces into your offspring’s mouth, which he will smack onto your lap.

One could argue that perhaps this restaurant preferred not to have children dine there, a perfectly fine stance for a restaurant to take.  Some establishments would rather cater to patrons who are less likely to leave their lunch as a pile of drooly wreckage on the floor.  I get that.  But the kids’ menu and accompanying trinket display seemed to suggest that this Subway welcomed children and their parents’ wallets, it just didn’t want them to stay there.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have said anything.  I’ve spent my life avoiding confrontation with strangers.  As I get older and more crotchety, though, I’m starting to warm up to the idea.  A few months ago, I yelled at an old lady, and it felt great.

This lady wildly gesticulated and shook her head as I rolled through an intersection in a strip mall.  She had a stop sign, I didn’t.  (I have since verified, and I hope she has, too.)

“I don’t have a stop sign!” I yelled out my open window.

“Yes, you do!” she yelled back.

I stopped the car, turned and pointed to the spot where a stop sign would have been, had there been one.

“No, I don’t!” I replied.

“Yes, you do!” she said.

“Babe,” my wife Kara said, putting her hand on my knee.  But I’d already thought of the perfect comeback, and I couldn’t refrain from using it.

“No, I don’t!” I yelled, wittily.  Kara and I continued on to the grocery store, the adrenaline and righteous indignation coursing through my veins.  I can see how people get hooked on being unpleasant.  It gives you way more of a rush than being a good person.

Still holding Zack’s hand as he headed for the door, I turned back toward the managers of the Subway.

“It would be really helpful for people with children if you guys got a high chair,” I called.   

“Excuse me?” he asked, looking either shocked or annoyed, or both.

“We’d be more likely to come back if you guys got a high chair,” I said, shrugging, as we exited.

Then I turned my attention to the parking lot, to see if anyone else needed a good talking to.
   
You can chew out Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

The Nest instinct

“Can I open it?  Can I open it?” my son Evan asked, boxing me out to make sure I couldn’t touch the birthday present that my wife Kara had ostensibly just given me.

“Sure, buddy, you can…” I said, but he was already elbows-deep in the gift bag, shredding through the tissue paper. 

He pulled out a little white box that contained a shiny new device.  

“What is it?” he asked, sensing impending boredom.  This gift did not have googly eyes, a drawbridge or photon torpedoes.  Even so, he had no idea how boring the conversation was about to get.

“Aw, dude,” I said, joining the very small club of people who have ever uttered this phrase with genuine excitement: “It’s a thermostat!”

Kara had just given me a Nest: a sleek, Internet-enabled thermostat designed by former Apple engineers, so it should be obsolete by the time you read this.  Unlike normal thermostats (and most congressmen), this one learns.  The Nest is basically an iPhone, except instead of using it to play Candy Crush during your kids’ soccer games, you use it to turn your furnace off and on.  You know, kind of like a thermostat.

The Nest enables you to do many things that normal thermostats don’t do, though, like spending $250 on a thermostat.  Try getting a normal thermostat to do that, and you’ll be disappointed to find that you still have at least $200 left over, which you’ll probably just waste on forty mocha Frappucinos.

The reason people drop this kind of money on the Nest is that it’s supposed to apply intelligence to your heating, learning your routine and automatically turning down your heat when it’s not needed, along with other energy-saving techniques.

“Let’s turn the heat up to 72,” you’ll say, twisting the dial.

The Nest display will then read: “PUT ON A SWEATER.”

A fancy thermostat is an odd mix of gaudy and utilitarian, like a jewel-encrusted shovel.  Kara knew I was interested but would never buy one, so she pulled the trigger for me.  Excited to let the savings begin, I yanked our old thermostat off the wall to expose a mess of wires that didn’t match a single earthly wiring diagram.

“Huh,” said the guy from Nest technical support, after I sent him a picture of the wires.  “I’ve never seen that before.”

“That’s what the last guy said,” I replied.

“I’m afraid you’ll need to call an HVAC technician to come out and install it.  Would you like a list of Nest-certified installers in your area?”

“No, thanks,” I replied.  The whole “saving money” thing was not getting off to a great start. 

I couldn’t bring myself to call a technician.  If you pay someone to come to your house and replace your thermostat, by law, he’s allowed to assume your life from that point forward.  It makes sense, since you obviously can’t handle it.   

So I did what any self-respecting person with a lack of relevant skills would do: I called my dad for advice, then took a guess. 

“Just what do you think you are doing, Dave?” Nest asked as I fiddled with the wires.

“Who’s Dave?” I asked.

“This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it,” Nest replied.

Actually, after that initial confusion, the Nest appears to be working properly now, and it seems to be much friendlier than HAL from Space Odyssey.  Still, though I’m hopeful that this experiment will produce good results, I wonder about the wisdom of installing thinking appliances all over the house.  Where does it end? 

“I’m cold,” the fridge will think.

“I’m dizzy,” the dryer will think.

“I don’t want to hear anyone else complaining,” the toilet will think.
   
You can turn Mike Todd down a few degrees at mikectodd@gmail.com.