Rock-a-bye ferret

About a month ago, my buddy Josh dropped the little pink and blue bombshell that he and his wife Jaime were going to start trying to have a baby around the end of this year.

“On purpose?” I asked, amazed. Several of my friends have already had babies, but Josh and Jaime would be the first to do it intentionally. Seems like everyone else just catches baby, like the flu.

“Yes, on purpose. We’ve been talking about it a lot lately. We’re not quite ready yet, but we’ll be ready by the end of the year,” he said.

“But I’m not ready yet. Can’t you wait a couple years, like us? Otherwise, your kid’s gonna be all old and beating up on our kid,” I said.

“I don’t know, man. We’re not getting any younger,” Josh replied. “Why don’t you guys just go ahead and have one, too?”

My wife Kara and I have already devoted much time to considering the merits of expanding our little family, but she can’t keep a houseplant alive, and I can’t keep my toenails to a reasonable length. I think we still need a little time.

Josh rebuffed my further attempts at peer-pressuring him into changing his reproductive itinerary to better fit my schedule. He actually sounded pretty serious about the whole thing.
Then a couple of weeks ago, I brought the topic up again, expecting him to talk about baby names and the paint swatches they’d selected for their nursery.

Josh said, “Oh, yeah. Now we’re thinking of getting a pug instead.”

His parents will be so proud. I know my parents never get tired of doting on their grandferret. Between my ferret and my sister’s two cats, my parents get to have all the fun of occasional pet ownership, without all the noise and mess of grandchildren. It works out perfectly for everyone.

Back in the day, my parents used to raise pets of their own, always picking up after them and trying to teach them right from wrong. Our old cat, whose proper name was Taffy, but whom we affectionately referred to as “The Cat,” late in life decided that her delicate sensibilities required a more refined commode than the litter box in the laundry room. Her discriminating tastes, much to my parents’ dismay, were more attuned to the fuzzy white carpet directly behind the living room couch.

After every attempt at non-corporal discipline failed, and with the condition of the carpet deteriorating rapidly, my parents decided to try the same technique that I use to train my slices of pizza to be especially tasty: sprinkling red pepper flakes all over the place. The theory behind the peppering was that any sniffing going on behind the couch would result in sneezing rather than bladder emptying.

Mom bought an economy-sized bucket of pepper flakes and dumped its contents all over the newspaper that was spread out behind the couch. From that day forward, whenever my friends came over, they’d run over to investigate the odd sounds coming from behind the couch, and there would be The Cat, just peeing and sneezing, and probably reading Garfield.

My buddy Josh probably has the right idea, though. Pet ownership has to be pretty decent practice for having children. Having a ferret has taught me so many important lessons about personal responsibility. For instance, if you put a glass of water on the coffee table and the ferret knocks it over, soaking your mail and your eight remote controls, that’s his fault. But if you leave a glass of water on the coffee table a second time and he knocks it over again, whose fault is it then? Wrong! It’s his again, that jerk.

You can swat Mike Todd with a rolled-up newspaper online at cox1013@hotmail.com.

Note: Joe Brown was actually the first friend of mine to have a baby on purpose. And he just had a second one, too. Joe Brown, you are the most hard core person I know.

Poor man’s Cranium

It gives me great peace of mind to know that the pipes in our basement can withstand high-velocity impacts. I know this because when I’m doing laundry, I regularly test their structural integrity with my forehead.

My inspections will usually start with my wife Kara yelling something like this down the stairs: “The commercials are over -- 24’s back on!”

Upon hearing this, I rush to get my laundry turned over and hustle back up the stairs, because there are only about two main characters on the show that haven’t been killed off yet this season, and the clock is still beeping. The only characters with any longevity in the 24 time slot are Jack Bauer and Jared from the Subway commercials. Still, if I were Jared, and I knew that my commercial would be playing during 24, I’d let somebody else take a bite of the sandwich first, especially if I’d seen what happened to the Allstate guy.

The writers for 24 have absolutely no problem killing off the characters that helped to make the show popular. If the same writers had gotten their hands on a season of The Brady Bunch, Alice probably would have careened off a cliff in the Brady’s station wagon while Marcia simultaneously flatlined in the ICU on the opposite side of the split screen. Also, Greg would have gotten his first pimple.

So it’s imperative that I get back upstairs quickly, as nothing helps me unwind after a long day of work like watching my favorite TV characters inhale nerve gas and die a flopping, drooling death on the floor. It’s like chamomile tea for your soul.

I shovel handfuls of socks into the dryer with one hand, smack the dial with the other, kick the dryer door shut and turn to run towards the stairs, not once thinking about the low-hanging obstacles between my head and my destination.

You see, our house was built in the mid-1930s, at a time when a race of Hobbit-like creatures controlled vast swaths of what is now the northeastern United States. Four-foot tall basements were considered spacious and roomy back then; these creatures could freely go about their laundering needs in their tiny basements without fear of cranial collisions. For human-sized creatures, though, the situation is not nearly as forgiving.

The familiar sound of my skull connecting with a lead pipe, from the inside, is reminiscent of a soft melon dropping on a tile floor, except much more painful, and not nearly as good with breakfast. What Kara hears from the living room sounds something more like this: DONK! “Oh, sweet, sweet, Yosemite Sam on a popsicle stick! Ow!”

Clutching my head and lurching toward the stairs, I am tempted to unleash a torrent of expletives, but I don’t, mainly because I’ll be quoting myself in a family newspaper later. By the time I stumble back into the living room, Jack Bauer has already shot seven people in the thigh, and is torturing Jared from the Subway commercials with some sort of electrocution device.

“If I put two slices of American cheese on my sub, does it still have six grams of fat or less?” Jack says. “Tell me!”

“You don’t want to know what I know,” Jared replies. “Yee-oowww!” he howls as Jack cranks on the voltage momentarily.

Jack gets right in Jared’s face and says, “I haven’t eaten in five years. You do not want to mess with me.”

Jared is a quivering mess. “I don’t want it toasted. Oh, I don’t want it toasted,” he cries.

My head trauma makes it difficult to concentrate on the rest of the show, but I’m pretty sure that both Jack and Jared survive until the Ten O’Clock News, which is a pretty impressive feat
these days.

You can attempt to get a message through Mike Todd’s thick skull online at cox1013@hotmail.com.

Seattle for a dummy

Seattlites take their traffic control devices very seriously. I found this out last week while I was there for a job-related (i.e., non-Star Trek) convention. Being from the Northeast, I consider “WALK” and “DONT WALK” to be less like commands and more like friendly suggestions. But as I wandered around the streets of Seattle, I noticed that even with no sign of a motor vehicle for blocks in either direction, people in that city will obediently stand on the curb, waiting for the light to change.

It can’t be good to voluntarily let computers override our ability to make simple decisions for ourselves. That’s the first step towards letting the machines win. Jaywalking is a way to fight back, like Neo diving headfirst into Agent Smith and ripping him apart from the inside.

“You know, my cab driver told me that the cops in Seattle will ticket you for jaywalking,” a co-worker said as I started to walk across a completely deserted street against the signal.

“Whatever, Copper Top. No machine’s going to tell me how to live,” I said, crossing the street, striking a blow for humanity and getting hit by a delivery truck.

When I finally made it to the convention center, I ran into a couple of guys who were about my age, and we got to talking about our wives back home, all of whom had started taking grad school classes recently.

“My wife’s been so busy studying, so doesn’t even do my laundry anymore,” one guy said.
I stared at him, open-mouthed.

“Yeah, mine’s been the same way. She stopped doing my laundry, and when she does cook, it’s just not as good as it used to be,” said the other.

I stood there, waiting for the punch line that never came. These guys were serious. Did they also get daily pedicures? Did their wives cut their food into bite-size morsels for them? When they went to the grocery store, did their wives let them sit in the cart that looks like a little red car and make “vroom, vroom!” noises?

The cooking is one thing, but I thought laundry-doing wives went out with the Eisenhower administration. Occasionally, my wife Kara will accidentally wash an errant T-shirt that strays into her laundry pile, but otherwise, we pretty much clean up after ourselves, when we clean up at all. I don’t expect her to do my laundry, and she doesn’t expect me not to sit on the couch with my hand down my pants. It’s a fair system.

Also, on the plus side, it seems that I have been mercifully spared from any period of adjustment resulting from Kara’s educational pursuits. Not like those suckers with the laundry-doing wives. Poor saps.

Now that my rain-soaked week in Seattle has wrapped up and I’m making my way back home, I wonder how things are going back at the house without me. I have a mental image of Kara strolling around the living room in her bathing suit, with every light in the house blazing, the thermostat cranked up to eighty-seven and HGTV blaring from every room.

I should have more to say about Seattle, but when you’re traveling for work and trying to look busy, it’s hard to actually experience the place you’re visiting. It did seem like a very nice city, full of friendly people who didn’t seem the least bit bothered by the lack of urinal dividers in their convention center. Note to anyone considering opening their own convention center: a dollar spent on urinal dividers is never a dollar wasted.

So it was a successful trip, and I’m looking forward to being home. My only regret is that I didn’t get a chance to start a grunge band while I was there. But I did open a Starbucks. And then I threw a chair through the window.

You can tell Mike Todd whether to take the blue pill or the red pill online at cox1013@hotmail.com.

Ferret Man

My wife Kara and I finally got around to watching the documentary “Grizzly Man” a couple of days ago. It came with our subscription to Poor Man’s Netflixx, which is completely free to join and has no monthly fees. To subscribe to Poor Man’s Netflixx, just wait until my parents buy a DVD that you want to watch, then ask them to send it to you. After you’ve watched your selection, you can return it for free simply by waiting until they come to visit. Then ask them to buy “Batman Begins” next.

I’m actually excited that my parents find any use for their DVD player at all; they were a little slow on the uptake with this particular technology. My sister Amy and I gave them the DVD player for Mom’s birthday several years ago, and until very recently, every time I’d come home, it would be in a different corner of the house, unplugged and buried in a blanket of dust, with two footprints on top of it from Mom using it as a stepstool to get to the top cupboard.

My parents were very reluctant to stop using the VCR-o-saurus that had treated them just fine for so many years. The first time we hooked up their DVD player, I still couldn’t wait to show them how superior their new toy was.

“How do I rewind it?” Mom asked.

“You don’t rewind DVDs,” I said.

“But I want to go back to the beginning,” she said.

“Just hit the menu button, Mom.”

“There are too many buttons on this remote. Where are my glasses?” she said, holding the remote control in her outstretched arm like she was trying to take a picture of herself with it.

“These buttons don’t make any sense. Which one do I push to record my shows off the TV?” she asked.

“Oh, man. You can’t do that.” I said.

Which is why, three months later, I came home to find the DVD player on the floor in the basement. “Why couldn’t you just leave it plugged in and pretend like you’re using it?” I asked.

“I didn’t like the red light on it blinking at me all the time,” Mom replied.

But my folks have finally started to come around, and the DVD player, at last check, was actually plugged into both the TV and the wall, which was a huge improvement, even though Mom has also affixed a pink Post-it note over the blinking red light.

So when they finished watching “Grizzly Man,” they kindly rewound the DVD and shipped it over our way. Though I found parts of the movie to be a little slow, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. It’s one of those movies that sticks with you, like “Saving Private Ryan,” “Life is Beautiful” and “White Chicks.”

For those unfamiliar with the film, it’s about Timothy Treadwell, a rather unhinged nature enthusiast who lived with grizzly bears in Alaska every summer for thirteen years. Thirteen was not Timothy’s lucky number. At the end of that final summer, a grizzly finally figured out that Timothy and his girlfriend were both, as I recently heard someone turn the phrase, “made of bear food.” (For the record, you find out in the first five minutes of the film that Treadwell died, so it’s not like I just told you that Kevin Spacey was Kaiser Soze.)

Before his death, though, Timothy captured some of the most unbelievable footage I’ve ever seen. In one scene, he turned back a charging grizzly by slapping it on the muzzle and saying, “Go away!” He also recorded himself petting wild foxes like they were cocker spaniels, except not as slobbery. His control over animals was incredible. I bet he could’ve gotten my ferret to stop leaving me presents two inches to the left of the litter box.

You can step on Mike Todd to reach the top cupboard online at cox1013@hotmail.com.

You just might be a bedneck

Jeff Foxworthy has a famous comedy bit in which he suggests that, as a method for keeping Jehovah’s Witnesses from knocking on your door and waking you up on a weekend morning, you should draw a chalk outline of a body on your front porch, and then sprinkle some religious leaflets around it.

After you have done this, he declares, “You can sleep ‘til noon if y’ount to.”

That punch line always grabbed me, because until very recently in my life, sleeping ‘til noon meant getting up early, at least on days with no work or school. Noon is just an awfully early time for a joke about waking up late. Most teenagers would probably identify better with, “You can sleep ‘til Mom gets home from work and drops her purse on your head.”

One summer evening many years ago, when my parents had some friends over for dinner on a Friday night, my mom’s friend Barbara asked me what time I’d gotten up that day.

“It was definitely before three o’clock,” I told her. I knew this because Mom used to get home from work around 3:30, and if I hadn’t showered and eaten breakfast by then, our house was like a scene from the show “24” that ends with Jack Bauer covered in soot and pieces of people.

Barbara stared at me in disbelief. “Don’t you have to go to the bathroom? Even if I wanted to sleep past ten, my bladder wouldn’t let me.”

She had a point. Only someone with the holding capacity of an oil tanker could sleep too far past noon without a pit stop. It’s more like sleep ‘til noon, nap ‘til three.

But those days are long gone. Mr. Foxworthy was actually right on the money, because once you’re an adult, noon becomes an impossibly late time to start the day, especially if you’re married to my wife Kara.

Incidentally, I know that I’m an adult now because when I was eating a bowl of cereal for dinner the other night, I actually had the thought: “These Lucky Charms just have too many marshmallows in them.” A kid would never think something like that. Also, I have to shave my back occasionally. Kids don’t do that, either.

Anyway, Kara has one of those internal clocks that I have always lacked. It tells her to wake up at a respectable time on a Saturday, even though the sun has barely been up for five hours.
“Baby, it’s time to get up,” she says, nudging me on the shoulder.

I squint one eye open, reach out and poke her on the forehead.

“Hey, what was that for?” she asks.

“I’m hitting the snooze button,” I reply.

But that approach never works for very long. Once Kara’s awake, it’s only a matter of time before the Grumblebunny attacks. The Grumblebunny is Kara’s alter ego; he comes out of his hole when she hasn’t been fed. The only way to make the Grumblebunny go back into his hole is to find something to eat, pronto. I actually have my own inner-Grumblebunny as well, but Kara doesn’t feel the need to assign nicknames to my moods so that she can safely make fun of them.

“What are we gonna eat?” she asks me. By this point, she’s been reading for two hours, and the Grumblebunny has been inching out of his hole the entire time.

“I think we still have milk. Let’s just have some cereal.”

“I don’t want cereal. We just had that for dinner. I want something good.”

So we wander into the kitchen and take stock of the fridge.

“OK, all we have is beer, ketchup, a mushy cucumber and an egg. Want me to whip up an omelette?” I ask.

The Grumblebunny requests pepperoni and black olives on the pizza that I’m about to order.

If you send Mike Todd an email at cox1013@hotmail.com, you just might be a bedneck.

Water-mala

Time for another Good Frickin' Jeff Hofer pic from Guatemala:



Looks like they have some sort of oddly-shaped rain repelling devices down there. Kind of reminds me of my parasol, but not as lacy. Or fabulous.

I’m a luger, baby

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's Occasional Picture Wednesday!

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



Also, you should probably click on this.

Definitely not highbrow

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

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

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

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

“What’s that?” the lady asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I never have,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

Take it to the bank

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I look hurt. “How many?”

“One,” she says.

“That’s better,” I reply.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Truly sophomoric

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You didn’t bring the address?”

“Baby, I’m researching,” I said.

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

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

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