When the kiddies go marching home

It’s amazing how much quieter the world gets when vacation ends and the four year-olds go home. My ears don’t quite know what to do with themselves. I have the same feeling I get when my wife clicks off the blow dryer, allowing all the other sounds to come rushing in, which are usually the sounds of PlayStation2 zombie heads exploding.

I’m finding that quieter isn’t really better. Everything is just a little bit more boring without five kids from two families tearing around the place. Now when I wake up in the morning, I can make it all the way to the bathroom without a four year-old latching onto my shin, sitting on my foot and yelling, “Go!”

Of course, when this happens, you have to encourage the child to say “please,” or the next thing you know they’ll be knocking over liquor stores without even thanking the proprietors.

“What’s the magic word?” I’d say.

“Go NOW!”

“I mean the other magic word.”

“Go FAST!”

“The other one.”

“Go, please?”

Forty pounds might not sound like that much, but when you’re dragging it around from your ankles, you learn very quickly that children do not make comfortable footwear, except maybe at Nike plants. Also, as long as they’re not the ones doing the work, kids don’t mind that it takes forty minutes to ride your leg to the kitchen. They’re too busy pinching out your leg hair. And when a six year-old grabs onto your other leg and yells “giddyup!” you could easily lose a footrace to a one-legged glacier.

As the week at the beach progressed, I was fascinated to learn that the hot commodity with people in the single-digit age bracket was other people’s litter. Kids all up and down the beach were pushing perfectly good sea shells out of the way to look for “sea glass,” which adults normally refer to as “broken beer bottles.” Sea glass has all the edges worn smooth, rendering it completely ineffectual in even the most rudimentary of bar fights.

To me, hunting for sea glass seems a lot like strolling along a meadow full of wildflowers and saying, “Aw, yes! Check out this cigarette butt I just found. Oh, smell it. Menthol! I bet whoever smoked this one had minty fresh breath. Do menthol smokers even need to brush their teeth? I’m saving this one for my butt-and-macaroni collage.”

But I suppose making little kids happy is about the best way to make use of other people’s slovenliness. If you’re the kind of person who hurls beer bottles into the sea, you can rest easy knowing that you’ve probably made some little girl’s day, assuming she avoided getting lacerated. If only we could get kids interested in “sea broken snowblowers,” I might finally get my garage cleared out.

As we walked with the kids down the beach looking for sea glass, the father of three of the kids said to me, “The transition from two kids to three is the hardest. When you have two kids, you can play man-to-man. When the third one comes along, you have to move to a zone defense.” The kids worked diligently on punching holes in that defense, driving hard to the basket all week long. They were just like little cookie-powered LeBron Jameses.

An ankle-deep wave came along and somehow managed to knock over all three kids, causing a Loony-Tunes-like dustup.

Their mother offered this: “Don’t kill your sister! I’m not making another one.”

But the kids quickly became distracted when their dad found a piece of blue sea glass, which is the Holy Grail of sea glass finds, and probably the most entertaining piece of trash not found in an E! True Hollywood Story. If those kids knew who Elvis was, they would have thought their dad was even cooler. Or at least as cool as the yellow Wiggle.

You missed Mike, you missed Mike, now you have to kiss Mike online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Dispatches from the Outer Banks

I don’t ask for much. Just a roof over my head, food to eat and, where appropriate, urinal dividers. But this week, life has kindly afforded me the brief opportunity to live under a really large roof right beside the ocean, all while having Oreos and beer for dinner and staying in bed ‘til noon on a Monday. Yes, it is vacation time, and my family has gathered for a beach week at the Outer Banks of North Carolina, one of the few places in the world where you can get run over by an SUV without leaving the comfort of your beach chair.

My first cousins, who lag in the procreation department only behind the Old Lady in the Shoe, brought all their little kids along, which is really excellent news, because if they didn’t, I have no idea who would eat all these cans of Spaghetti-O’s.

When you only get a chance to visit with your little cousins once a year, they turn into different little wonderful people every time you see them. Since last summer, some of them have learned how to dress themselves, speak proper English and use the toilet, which is already better than most of my friends from college.

As good as they’ve gotten at becoming functioning little people, these kids sorely need to develop an appreciation for sleeping in. Every dawn in this house has been marked by a thundering herd of children tearing through the hallways. Marshall University should put pictures of my little cousins on their football helmets. For the past few days, these kids have gotten up so early that nearby roosters have been pulling their pillows over their heads and saying, “Dudes, just a few more minutes. Please.”

Yesterday, my little cousin Johnny reached down into the sand and picked up something that had attracted his attention. He turned to his Uncle Dave and said, “Look, I found mini coconuts!”

Uncle Dave was busy sweeping out his Ford Explorer, which, after being in the Outer Banks for a couple days, had enough sand in it to host a beach volleyball tournament.

“That’s neat,” said Dave, not turning around. Then the realization dawned on him that there couldn’t possibly be mini coconuts in the driveway of the beach house; there wasn’t a tree in sight. There were, though, several wild horses roaming nearby.

Dave turned to see Johnny proudly waving around his new toys, which were not actually in the fruit family at all, unless you count horse apples. I’m not sure what exactly transpired next, but the number of high-fives in this household has dropped precipitously since that story started going around.

While we only had to drive through a few states to come down here, there are some readily apparent cultural differences. Even though I have exclusively Southern blood pumping through my Arby’s-clogged veins, I’m just not used to seeing Confederate flags on anything other than the occasional rusted-out pickup truck. The house next door has one casually flying off the deck, causing me to wonder if we are vacationing next to the Confederate Embassy. They probably hammer out important diplomatic issues over there, like how to confront the growing threat of ketchup-based BBQ sauce over vinegar-based BBQ sauce, and whether Wal-mart counts as the South rising again.

I don’t have too much time to worry about the Stars and Bars, though, when I’m still trying to figure out if I need to be offended that my cousins made me be the Pink Ranger. And while I know next-to-nothing about how to keep little kids under control, I have learned over the past few days that it can never be a good thing when you hear, from some distant corner of the house, a five year-old yell, “Timmmmm-ber!”

You can share your best rebel yell with Mike Todd online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Something to chirp about

My wife Kara has a special connection with nature. She’s like one of those animal whisperers who get their own shows on the Discovery Channel. Just this morning, as several birds were enthusiastically chirping in the maple tree outside our window before the sun came up, I witnessed the beauty of Kara speaking directly with the natural world.

“Shut up!” she said to nature.

“Caw! Caw! Chirp chirp chirp,” nature replied.

“I can’t sleep. They never shut up. Can you sleep?” she asked me.

“Not anymore,” I said. Even if the birds perched on my forehead, pecked at my cheeks and cooked Belgian waffles with canned whipped cream on my nightstand, I could probably still sleep through it. They’d have to start a death metal band in our maple tree to wake me up. Incidentally, a really good death metal band name for them would be “Cardinal Sin.”

But Kara can’t ignore the birds because she’s so attuned to nature that she just lies there in bed interpreting birdsong. Apparently, they’re saying, “WAKE UP! WAKE UP! And wake your husband up, too.”

Several years ago, my buddy Josh gave us a bird feeder as a housewarming present, which I left in the basement until just before his next visit a year later. On that Friday, he called from the road to say: “We’re going to be there in fifteen minutes, and if that bird feeder isn’t out of the box yet, I’m taking it and cramming it up the first orifice I find.”

“Dude, I told you already. I hung it in the backyard months ago,” I replied. Then I dusted off the box from the basement, ran out to the backyard and hung that thing from a branch just in time to avert an invasive anterior birdfeederoplasty. That’s where the feeder has stayed ever since, and it’s been empty since about that Sunday evening. As it turns out, Josh didn’t get us a bird feeder at all; he accidentally got us a squirrel feeder. To turn a squirrel feeder into a bird feeder, you need booby traps and laser beams and axle grease, and I just haven’t put in the time to formulate a proper strategy for doing so, mainly because it seems like the birds out there are doing just fine without our help, especially around 4am, when they begin to gather for their conversation with my wife, the bird screamer.

My parents have successfully converted a couple squirrel feeders into bird feeders in their front yard, using techniques that they’ve perfected over the last couple of decades. There are more trap doors and obstacles around those feeders than there were in the last event of American Gladiators. Still, the squirrels never give up, trying the same unsuccessful tactics over and over again like they think they’ve been elected president.

My parents’ success at creating a happening place for cute little birdies to hang out hasn’t gone unnoticed a little higher up the food chain. As Mom ate breakfast recently, a hawk swooped down and snatched a bird off the feeder. Mom did the only thing a moderately sane person could do, which is to go out in the yard and yell at the hawk as it enjoyed its breakfast high up in a tree. As someone who has received a fair amount of discipline from Mom, the only advice I might offer is that next time she try the “I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed in you” talk. That hawk would never touch another bird again, at least not until it went to college.

Anyway, be sensitive about the bird situation when you visit my folks. Mom doesn’t think it’s funny when you ask how her hawk feeders are doing.

You can push Mike Todd out of the nest online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Wiener arithmetic from the lowest common denominator

It’s been sixteen years since Steve Martin made his daring exposé of the wiener industry in the movie “Father of the Bride,” but still we’ve made alarmingly little progress in our wiener-related pursuits since. My wife Kara and I were doing our Memorial Day duties last weekend by buying hot dogs, which come in packs of ten, and buns, which, infuriatingly to those of us who have little to no perspective on what’s actually worth getting angry about in life, come in packs of eight.

Steve Martin’s famous grocery store tirade went like this: “I'll tell you what I'm doing. I want to buy eight hot dogs and eight hot dog buns to go with them. But no one sells eight hot dog buns. They only sell twelve hot dog buns. So I end up paying for four buns I don't need. So I am removing the superfluous buns. Yeah. And you want to know why? Because some big-shot over at the wiener company got together with some big-shot over at the bun company and decided to rip off the American public.”

This scene came out way back in the time when gas was cheap and rock stars were androgynous, but we’re still being ripped off. In the interim, the bun makers have apparently acquiesced, removing the four superfluous buns, but in a cruel twist, the hot dogs folks added two more dogs. All this bun-and-wiener shuffling accomplished was raising the least common multiple of wieners and buns from 24 to 40. Also, I hope my third grade math teacher reads this. I think she’d be proud that I took a break from rolling booger balls out of rubber cement long enough to retain something she taught us other than “rulers are meant for measuring, not swashbuckling,” though I still think she was looking at me just a little too much during the unit on lowest common denominators.

Kara and I have enough trouble feeding ourselves without food companies making us remember our multiplication tables. Every night, we sit around at dinnertime staring at each other, seeing who will crack first and just pour a bowl of cereal. Kara will invariably say something like this: “We should just go and buy stuff to make a salad.” How this addresses the issue of dinner is still rather unclear.

My buddy Gimp eats steamed vegetables and rice for dinner every single night. I’m not sure how he has enough strength left to answer the phone when I call, but the point is that he never deviates from the one meal he likes to cook. Actually, most of my guy friends eat the same thing every single day, just like I did before Kara came along and started rocking the culinary boat until Mama Celeste fell overboard.

It’s against the natural order of the world to eat different things every day. Cavemen, back before they started selling insurance and going all metrosexual, didn’t complain about not having a varied menu to eat every day.

I bet you’d never hear a caveman say, “Aw, man, gazelle again?”

It probably went more like this: “Sweet merciful heavens -- gazelle again! I can’t believe our good fortune to have something to eat day after day. I hope we never run out of gazelle. Also, I hope someone invents toilet paper soon.”

I’m lucky I don’t have to catch my food out in the wild. Here’s how good my instincts are: when I’m walking around the house in the dark and I see a shape on the floor that is either a leaf or a “present” from our ferret, I poke it to find out which it is. Someone who does that could probably find a way to get eaten by a woodchuck.

You can tell Mike Todd that a salad is a meal online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

School’s out forever

I have some bad news for video game zombies everywhere: your brain-eating days are numbered. I just finished grad school, and I’ll have nothing better to do with my evenings than to shoot you repeatedly, hopefully in the head, as that helps to conserve ammo.

After three-and-a-half years of whining, griping and sometimes even studying, I finally managed to earn an MBA (Master of the Bulldoodoo Arts) degree in my “spare time,” which I put in quotes because the only time that’s really spare is the time you spend with your wife when she’s making you watch America’s Next Top Model.

Taking classes after work is a great way to earn an education without having to live on a college student’s diet of Ramen noodles and Milwaukee’s Best. Still, if someone came up to me and said, “You have two choices: you can either earn another degree after work or you can swallow and pass this regulation billiard ball right here,” I’d probably have to take a vacation day to weigh my options, and possibly to start practicing on golf balls.

I once complained about how grad school was sucking the marrow out of my life to a friend of mine who has two kids. He looked at me without the slightest hint of sympathy.

“You may think you don’t have free time. You might sit around all day saying to yourself ‘Gee, I don’t have any extra time at all.’ Well, let me tell you something, Bucko. If you don’t have kids, you have an astronomical amount of free time. You have free time you don’t even know you have yet.”

Maybe that’s true. But now that I’m done with school, I’ll definitely have more time to try to find something worth grubbing other than grades. Or I might even find time to venture out to the backyard to try to turn our above-ground swamp back into a pool again. For the record, we didn’t even want a pool. It just came with the house, like the plastic cup of cole slaw that comes with your deli sandwich. Even though taking care of a pool, especially one parked under seventeen enormous maple trees, can be a chore, I’m really looking forward to relaxing and skimming the pool without worrying about term papers and final exams. There’s a certain Zen-like simplicity to skimming a pool, but you wouldn’t want to make a career out of it. That’s why there are no cabana men.

But I’m really looking forward to rekindling a relationship with a certain hot little number that’s been patiently waiting for my time ever since I started taking classes. That’s right, my PlayStation2. When you get wrapped up in working and taking classes, it’s easy to lose track of what’s really important in life: saving the world from mutant plagues that turn entire towns into zombies who must have their heads blown off for the good of mankind.

If you thought I was going to mention something about spending more time with my wife, I’d love to, but she still has two classes left to take this summer to finish her own grad degree. The best I can do for her is to shut the door while I’m watching all three Lord of the Rings movies in one gluttonous stretch. I’d love to feel sorry for her, but I started school almost two years before she did, and now she’s only a couple of months from being done, too. She almost lapped me.

Regardless, this summer is just about here, and I, at least, will have loads of free time with which to enjoy it. Summer and free time: those are two things that just go together, like bacon and egg n’ cheese.

You can give Mike Todd pencils, books and/or dirty looks online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

The fog of fake war

When we left our hero (okay, it was only me) last week, he was searching his old gym bag desperately for his jock strap from high school in preparation for getting pelted mightily with paintballs at a bachelor party over the coming weekend. That event has happily passed, and I’m relieved to report that all the parts that were intact before last weekend continue to be intact today, as far as I’ve inventoried.

I almost bailed on the trip, mostly because Carrie Underwood came very close to convincing me that I was too old to go shooting twenty-five year olds out in the woods. If your car comes equipped with a device that can receive oscillating electromagnetic fields and convert them into sound, you may have heard one of Carrie’s songs seventeen times a day, no matter which frequency of radiated waves you chose to receive. This is because Carrie has released what it known as a crossover hit. The success of crossover hits are measured in units called “Shanias,” and Carrie’s song “Before He Cheats” stretches at least three Shanias long.

It seems rather unfair that songs from other genres can’t cross over to country radio. Keith Urban may escape from the country station and crawl all over the dial, but Kanye West still won’t get any playtime on Big Belt Buckle 98.1. Country radio only has an exit door, not an entrance, and country music listeners will often tell you that exit doors are only to be used for exiting.

Whenever I hear Carrie singing, “I dug my key into the side of his pretty little souped-up four-wheel drive, carved my name into his leather seats. I took a Louisville slugger to both head lights, slashed a hole in all four tires, and maybe next time he'll think before he cheats,” all I can think is, “Is his insurance going to cover all that? I mean, if he has comprehensive, the glass on the headlights should definitely be covered, depending on his deductible.”

After realizing that I was having these thoughts, I almost canceled out on the paintball trip for fear that it was too late for me -- time to just give up, buy a velvet robe and subscribe to the Wall Street Journal. But I decided to go ahead and gun it anyway. Once you’re in the real world, you don’t too often get a chance to do things that scare you, at least not things that don’t involve PowerPoint presentations, so I cowboyed up and joined the group last Saturday for our faux shootout.

I give myself some credit for being brave enough to leave my old cup in the car, figuring that paintball technology has probably progressed to the point where the bullets just feel like soapy bubbles popping on your skin anyway.

“I bet you’re so pumped up that you don’t even feel it,” I told myself as we waited in line for our guns and camouflage jumpsuits.

That’s when one of the groom-to-be’s buddies turned to me and said, “Last time I did this, I got nailed right in the crotch.”

“Seriously?” I asked, the color draining from my face.

“Oh, yeah. Somebody zinged one right in there,” he said, proceeding to recount the incident in graphic detail. As soon as the words “swelled up like a grapefruit” came out of his mouth, my feet began running back to the car, totally independent of any direction from my brain, which was still trying to understand how a comparison to that section of the produce aisle could possibly be warranted.

Bringing that cup with me was the smartest thing I’ve ever done. Wearing the cup, a facemask and a camouflage suit, I felt invincible, like Achilles with a prosthetic foot. At least until the first paintball careened off my skull, leaving a goose egg that Jack would have climbed a beanstalk to steal.

You can carve your name into Mike’s inbox at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Like inward singing, but better

Dudes, I just had this revolutionary new idea. What if you took some pictures of your pet and put them ON THE INTERNET??? Did I just blow your mind? I haven't quite worked out the kinks, but when this catches on, it might look something like this:

Or perhaps this:

Or maybe even this:

Someday, the technology may advance to the point where we can post pictures of something other than ferrets playing in guitar cases, at which point I'll stop collecting royalties. Until that day, please send me a nickel for every ferret-in-guitar-case picture you put on the internet.

Primping for the Paint Ball

If you’re anything like me, when you think bachelor party, you think Allentown, PA. This weekend, I’m heading just outside of Allentown to join a bunch of guys I’ve never met before for my future brother-in-law’s bachelor party. Actually, I’m a little unclear on the rules of whether we are going to be brothers-in-law or not, but we both chose the same family from which to plunder our brides, so that should count for something.

It was with great trepidation that I accepted the invitation to join this party, mostly because the main event will be a full day of shooting each other with paintballs. I usually make it a policy to avoid putting myself in situations in which projectiles will be enthusiastically fired in my direction, but it didn’t seem right to duck this one. Kris and I are going to be family soon, so if I can donate my rear end to the cause of family togetherness by having caps popped in it all day, that’s a price I’m willing to pay. Besides, never having paintballed probably makes me less of an American citizen; paintballing is as American as apple pie and racist mascots.

The first time I ever heard of paintball was in ninth grade, when my buddy Joe sat next to me in biology class on Monday morning. He was covered in welts that were big enough to have served Cornish hens upon.

“Dude, what happened to you? You look like you lost a fight with a tennis ball machine,” I said.

“I went paintballing this weekend,” he said. “Check out these bruises here. It was so much fun. You should try it.”

“That’s very tempting. Maybe I’ll try it in fifteen years or so,” I replied. It looks like my time has expired.

The package deal for a day of paintball includes 1,000 paint balls per person. That’s enough ammo to give Charlton Heston pause. I would have thought twenty or so paintballs would have been more than enough for the day. Is 1,000 really necessary? I guess it’s fine if they want to give me 1,000 paintballs, but I really worry that they’re going to give that many to everyone else, too. I just don’t see how this day is going to end any other way than with all of us limping out of the woods looking like something that Jackson Pollock did.

Dad always said that you don’t learn anything until you get out of your comfort zone, and facing the possibility of getting shot in the crotch with a paint-filled marble is definitely not anywhere near my comfort zone, so I’m really looking forward to all the learning to be done this weekend. I assume the educational topics will revolve around field first aid and different techniques for surrendering.

A quick trip to the paintball field’s Web site dispelled the notion that whimpy participants, should there hypothetically be any, could just hide behind trees or bury themselves in leaf piles while listening to podcasts until it was all over, if that’s what they were planning on doing, which I wouldn’t know. The setup there is alarmingly elaborate, with fake Wild West towns and huge plywood castles. Nobody said anything about storming castles. They better not supply the castle folk with cauldrons of burning paint.

Anyway, it’s good to get outside to do something different from your normal routine, even if that something different is going to leave you covered in bruises, possibly the kind with a yellow tinge. From personal experience, I can say that the most important question you can ask when you’re preparing to do something that makes you a little uneasy is this: Where did I put that old cup I used to use for Karate?

You can train your crosshairs on Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Totally selling out

When my wife Kara and I first decided to put our house on the market, a co-worker warned me how little fun this process was going to be for us. Having the misfortune to have listed about two weeks after the real estate boom ended, his house sat on the market for longer than it takes some people to earn college degrees. Back in the days when buyers roamed the suburbs in thunderous herds, you could order an ice cream cone and sell your house before it melted. These days, in the time it takes to unload a home, a Twinkie could very well rot.

A distinction must be drawn between selling a house, which sounds like it surely must be heaps of fun, and attempting to sell a house, which ranks somewhere on the fun scale between fender benders and farming accidents. Before we listed our house, we didn’t even own a mop. Now we go through mop heads like they’re U.S. attorneys. Our vacuum hasn’t seen this much action since the Great Ferret Litter Spill of ’04.

We’ve spent most of our recent weekends making the house look pretty for people we’ll most likely never hear from again. Like spurned lovers, we sit by the phone, waiting for the call that doesn’t come, wondering what we should have done differently. Actually, most modern-day spurned lovers probably sit by the computer, waiting for the wink that doesn’t come, but the effect is largely the same; anguish is technology independent.

“Dude, I left my underwear on the magazine rack in the bathroom,” I confessed after our last appointment. “I didn’t realize it until after the people had already come through.”

Despite one’s best intentions, even with hours of preparation and careful double-checking of every room, it can be very tough to bring rogue underpants under control.

“I’d love to know if anyone has ever decided not to buy a house because of underwear in the bathroom,” Kara said.

But who knows? It’s impossible to know what combination of factors comes together to drive buyers to make the most important decisions of their lives. Home buyers are like horses – you never know what’s going to spook them. Underwear in the bathroom is a flash bulb going off. Most horses will act like they don’t even notice, but some might freak out and gallop for the exit.

As frustrating as the process can be, with all of its ups, downs and inherent stress, it’s still not that bad of a gig. It just takes a while to find the right person, somebody who agrees to move in, spruce up your house, fix all the things that break and pay you for the privilege. All you have to do is leave and never come back. That’s a tough deal to beat.

For the past few days, we’ve been working on the house while Kara has been dealing with a terrible cold. Being the good husband that I am, I bring her chicken soup in a squeeze bottle so she doesn’t have to put down the mop.

Getting a cold when you’re an adult isn’t any fun because you’re already allowed to eat candy whenever you want. When you’re a kid, getting sick means you can munch on Luden’s cherry cough drops all day long, which don’t do squat for your cough, but your teacher can’t take them from you. Incidentally, we just discovered that Sudafed is more difficult to purchase than most firearms.

“We have to keep it behind the counter now,” the pharmacist said as he looked Kara’s driver’s license over, entering her information into the computer. “People were using it for other purposes.”

I remembered the story I’d heard a little while back on NPR. “Oh, you can make crystal meth with it,” I said. It wasn’t really necessary to point that out, but I wanted the pharmacist to think I was hip.

You can make Mike Todd an offer he can’t refuse online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Saying yes to crack

**Update 4/30/07** Jered Earl finally responded to my lame challenge. Kara whooped him pretty good with the stick picture, but it's worth stopping by Jered's Life at Actually 30 to see the best picture of Mao Zedong gleeking that you're likely to see all day. We now return to your regularly scheduled and intermittently diverting column.

One of the few joys of having the house to myself for a couple of days, besides being able to crack my knuckles with unscolded abandon, is the freedom to leave a copious and varied array of hairs in the bathroom sink without fear of having to talk about it later. Other than that, being here without my wife Kara is not all that exciting. Contrary to what Hollywood may tell you, staying home alone has very little to do with swinging paint cans into Joe Pesci’s head, and much more to do with wondering if anyone else in the world could possibly be enjoying this episode of “According to Jim,” because somebody must be enjoying the show or they would just stop making it. The people who keep “According to Jim” on the air must be the same people who keep the store shelves stocked with black licorice.

On normal days, when Kara is not in Atlanta whooping it up at her sister’s bachelorette party, my knuckle-cracking drives her to the brink. I never realized what a cracky person I was until I married someone who would rather listen to a pickup truck’s door slamming into the side of her Civic than the joint on my pinky finger popping. I can also crack my toes repeatedly without touching them, which is not as impressive a skill as belching on command, but it still gets quite a response if performed to the right audience.

Last week, after a particularly robust round of cracking, Kara said, “Stop cracking! Seriously. I can’t take it anymore.”

So I asked her the question that makes it impossible for someone to stay mad at you, no matter how badly they might want to: “How much do you love me? On a scale of 1 to 10, I mean.” If you’re in a serious relationship, then you already know that true love is all about quantification.

After a brief hesitation, she asked, “You mean right at this moment?”

“No, just in general,” I said.

Of course she said ten. My Jedi mind tricks were too powerful for her; it was out of her control. Also, if you ask your partner this question and the reply you get is “10,” which of course it has to be, don’t be upset that you didn’t get an eleven. Coaches and deodorant commercials have poisoned our minds to believe that we can give 110%. That’s just not possible. We all need to learn to be happy with giving and receiving 100% again. Otherwise, after accounting for expectation inflation, soon we’ll have to give 130% just to keep up. Honestly, any reasonable person should be happy to get even 95%, because you need to save at least 5% to play WarCraft later.

Left to my own remote-control devices for the past couple of days, though, I’m beginning to worry that my cracking problem is getting out of hand. There’s just nobody to enforce any discipline around here, and I’m totally taking advantage of my own leniency. The thing I fear most in life is that all of this investment in knuckle-cracking today is going to pay vast arthritic dividends in the future. And also that a yellow jacket is going to crawl into my Coke can while I’m not paying attention.

Before she left for her trip, Kara spent three says deciding whether or not to pack everything in a carry-on bag. As she stood staring at the big suitcase and the little suitcase that she’d put side-by-side on the bed, she said, “I can’t believe I’m going to be the matron of honor at Jill’s wedding. Why can’t I still be a maid? Matron makes me sound so old.”

“Aw, c’mon, you’ve earned it,” I said. “Besides, you’re, like, one of the hottest matrons I know.”

You can offer matronly advice to Mike Todd online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Take only pictures, leave only beer bottles

Here are some shots from a hike my sister Amy and I took last weekend at one of the coolest places in the universe: Sam's Point, a nature preserve at the southern end of the Shawangunk Ridge near Ellenville, NY.

Looking at this creek flowing through the woods and over the edge of the cliff last Saturday, I couldn't help but wonder, "Am I missing any good Law and Order reruns right now?" What a stupid thing to think. Of course I was. Probably one where Lenny had to chase a dude.

Here's some natural Jenga:

Here's a shot from the money spot overlooking Verglockenspiel Verdonkadonk Verkeerderkill Falls:

And my sister Amy chillin' on Wile E. Coyote Rock:

Remember, if you like nature, you have to drink water directly out of a big blue straw attached to your shoulder. Water bottles are so 1997.

Here's a look back at the Scha-winnnnngunk Ridge. Party on.

Sam's Point is a preserve for endangered dwarf pines. They're endangered because poachers prize them for their needles, which can be mashed into a tea that totally settles one's tum-tum. Actually, I have no idea why they're endangered, but you may recognize the famous Seven Dwarf Pines in this picture (from left to right): Needly, Piney, Pokey, Coney, Sticky, Sappy and Doc.

That's all I got. Have a great weekend, homeperson.