Getting mowed down

When my buddy Don found out that my wife Kara and I were moving to a new house, he decided to get us a second-hand tractor as a housewarming present. “It’s from a friend of mine who lives up in the hills. He has all sorts of tractors sitting beside one of his sheds. I’ll grab one of them for you,” he said.

Having some experience receiving hand-me-down machinery, I was hesitant. A couple of years ago, my father-in-law inadvertently handed us down a snowblower that functioned excellently as a gasoline squirter. Now that I think about it, maybe I was supposed to burn the snow off the driveway.

The next week, Don smiled with satisfaction as he said, “I got a couple of nice tractors from my buddy last weekend. One of them doesn’t have any blades, and the other one doesn’t have any brakes. I saved you the one with no brakes. I gave the one with no blades to my buddy so his kid can ride it around the yard.”

I stared at him blankly, my spider-sense tingling.

“Oh, don’t worry. It runs nice and smooth. It came from Montgomery Ward’s,” he said.

“Don, I don’t know about this. I’m sure your friend Montgomery means well, but aren’t brakes kind of important?” I asked.

“Oh, no. You don’t really need them on a tractor. Just don’t take it on any hills,” he said.

I pictured myself slaloming around the neighborhood, children diving into the bushes as I tried to steer to where the anchor could grab hold of a tree. At the very least, I’d need to put a bumper sticker on the seat reading: “This Vehicle Does Not Stop. At All.”

When I told Kara about the snazzy piece of equipment that Don had retrieved for us, she said, “Please don’t take a tractor with no brakes. We don’t need another project.” This may sound like reasonable advice, but Kara doesn’t have a whole lot of credibility when it comes to lawn-related issues. Just about every person who gets stuck with mowing the lawn attempts to develop some semblance of an algorithm to keep grass going under the blades. Back-and-forth. Ever-shrinking concentric circles. Here is Kara’s mowing algorithm:

1. Aim for tallest clump of grass

2. Repeat for five minutes

3. Return mower to garage

When Kara gets done mowing, the lawn looks like a Gremlin’s haircut. But still, she was right about Don’s tractor. I just wasn’t sure how to best handle the situation, as he’d already gone through so much effort to do something nice for us. It was like when your cat offers you a dead bird.

Luckily, fate smiled on all of us, reaching down with its wispy fingers and snapping the front axle as Don was trying to put brakes on. If it had to die, at least it died with someone who truly loved it. The tractor is dead. Long live the push mower!

Since we still haven’t sold the house that we vacated earlier this summer, I’m now mowing both of our lawns with my trusty old push mower. I don’t go anywhere without it. It’s the Silver to my Lone Ranger, except Silver probably required less pushing and, I would suspect, preferred a less invasive refueling procedure.

With so much of my time spent mowing, I fear that I may be slowly and irreversibly turning into Groundskeeper Willie. It’s only a matter of time before I start pushing a cart around the neighborhood yelling, “Get your haggis, right here! Chopped heart and lungs boiled in a wee sheep's stomach. Tastes as good as it sounds!”

Until then, if you need me for anything, try looking on the lawn. I’m the one in the kilt.

You can hit Mike Todd with a tractor beam at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Float like a canoe, sting like a bee

After I wrote last week’s column about planning to remove the above-ground pool in my backyard, a reader (we’ll call her “Anne,” because that’s her name), wrote to say that she had a similar situation in her own backyard, and likewise found the work/fun ratio of owning a pool to be just slightly better than the work/fun ratio of mining salt. Anne found herself dreading both spring and fall, two otherwise pleasant seasons that prominently feature trees dressing and undressing themselves while Gap tries to figure out how it can possibly persuade you to buy more khakis. Of course, you don’t notice these things if you own a pool, mostly because you’re too busy trying to tell if the underwater vacuum is sucking anything other than the joy out of your life.

Faced with the toil of opening and closing the pool each season, Anne would have been driven completely off the deep end, saved only by the fact that above-ground pools don’t have deep ends. Circles don’t really have ends at all, actually. Perhaps she would have just been driven to an area of uniform depth within the confines of the pool walls. Regardless, things had gotten so bad that Anne, moved to desperation, considered solving her temporary problem with a permanent solution: real estate. “I have thought about moving just to get away from the pool,” she wrote.

Luckily, the internet offers an easier solution. If you removed whatever you have right now in your bellybutton and offered it for free on Craigslist, somebody would come and take it from you. You probably wouldn’t want to invite them in for cookies, though.

I don’t mean to generalize too much; pools are great for some families, mainly other people’s. But if you’re thinking about getting an above-ground pool, you might want to pause and consider Anne’s story. There are many things in the world that would be more fun to get than a pool, like a Nintendo Wii or typhoid fever.

Our new friend Steve from Craigslist was as excited to get the pool as we were to give it to him. It was a joyous, cathartic demolition, like taking down a mean kid’s sandcastle or the Berlin Wall. As Steve was taking pieces of the pool around the house and loading them onto his trailer, my wife Kara and I raked over the crater where the pool had been. Just as we were finishing smoothing out the dirt, I noticed a bumblebee flying around Kara’s shirt sleeve. All of a sudden, the bee disappeared.

I should interject here that when my dad and I used to take canoeing trips with the Boy Scouts, there was a kid named Chris who gained fame over the years for his prowess at navigating through the more difficult rapids. Instead of yelling useful information back to his dad, such as “There’s a rock coming up on the left!” or “We’re about to go over a waterfall!” Chris would just yell, “Rock!” Every night at camp, his dad would say, “Chris, when we’re in the rapids, you need to tell me more than just ‘rock.’ Try to tell me where the rock is, or which way we should go to avoid the rock.” The next day, you’d see them colliding with half-submerged boulders as Chris yelled, “Rock!”

I was every bit as helpful as Chris when I pointed at Kara’s sleeve and said, “Bee!”

Kara suddenly looked as though she had a bee in her bonnet, and by bonnet I mean T-shirt. She ripped off her shirt and ran around the yard yowling in her bra, the first bee sting of her life fresh on her shoulder. Steve suddenly remembered that he’d left something in his truck, retreating from Kara’s impromptu exhibition.

“Ow! That really stings,” she said later, fully clothed.

“Yeah, that’s why they’re called that,” I said.

Now, whenever a bee comes within twenty yards, Kara runs around in circles yelling, “Babe! Babe!” as if I’m somehow responsible for the goings on. It’s not like I’m the one chasing her. I caught her years ago.

You can remove Mike Todd from your backyard at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Craigslist and Mikespool

Apparently, savvy homebuyers these days just don’t have an appreciation for leaking, algaefied monstrosities that fill up the whole backyard and suck the cash out of your wallet and the leisure time out of your life with equal vigor. My wife Kara and I arrived at this conclusion after receiving a raft of negative feedback about our above-ground albatross from people who otherwise seemed interested in buying the house that we vacated earlier this summer. Now that buyers are holding the cards and sellers are holding the bag, it seems that folks are much less willing to inherit oversized bowls of chlorine and misery than we were four years ago.

If I had a Delorean and 1.21 Jigowatts, I’d go back to the day we closed on the house and tell myself, “Start getting rid of the pool today! You’re going to spend the next four years scooping unbelievable amounts of leaves out of it and you’re only going to swim in it twice. Also, don’t try to pick individual stocks for your retirement plan. Please.”

But how were we to know at the time? A pool seemed like a fun thing to have. I guess you have to experience things for yourself before you ever really know. Now I know that I don’t like differential equations, I hate it when eggplant disguises itself as chicken and swimming pools are much more fun when owned by friends.

Paying two mortgages at the beginning of each month has also started to give us an interesting and not entirely pleasant sensation, one that under normal circumstances could only be achieved with the aid of a sigmoidoscope. For all of these reasons, we decided that it was finally time to do the humane thing and put the pool down.

Though my dad had offered to come spend a weekend crawling in the dirt to help remove the pool and the adjoining deck, I thought I’d first try to find an unsuspecting rube somewhere on the internet to take it off our hands. I’d never sold anything on Craigslist before, but it seemed to be the place the world goes to shift junk from one person to another.

I created an ad that said, “If you’ll help take down the pool and haul off my deck too, you can have them both for FREE. Heck, you can even have the noodles.” You can tell I took a marketing class by the way I put the word “FREE” in caps.

I’d hoped to hear back from maybe one or two people. Within an hour, I had thirty responses in my inbox. I quickly amended the ad to say, “I have accidentally kicked off a pool-wanting stampede with this ad. You’re welcome to respond still, but please be aware that you might have a better chance at being the next American Idol.”

I should have just deleted the ad right then. Unfortunately, the disclaimer only served to kick up the desperation level in the emails.

“We’re praying to the good Lord that you’ll choose us for the pool.”

“Hi my name is kevin and i’m twelve years old and dad says if I write this email insted of him that maybe you’ll pick us. Please can we have your pool I like swimming and it would make me happy.”

“My sister just had hip surgery. The doctor says she needs to swim to recuperate…”

And so on. The bane of the backyard had suddenly turned into the toast of the town. The ad garnered seventy-five responses in the few hours it remained online. After much dithering and guilt over having to crush the chlorine-drenched dreams of seventy-four families, we picked Steve, a guy who had all the attributes you look for in a guy who wants to adopt your pool: a box truck and a trailer.

You can fish Mike Todd out of the skimmer box at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Good day and good luck

The new guy on National Public Radio’s “Marketplace” segment in the morning signs off his portion of the broadcast with “In Los Angeles, I'm Doug Krizner. Make it a good day.” That last part always catches me a little off guard. It’s not enough to just have a good day plopped in your lap; Doug thinks you should go out and make one for yourself. It’s a nice sentiment, but what if we’re not up to the challenge? Sometimes the world confounds your best efforts to make it a good day. You never know when you’re going to spill scalding hot tea on your crotch or invade a Middle Eastern country without an exit plan.

Edward R. Murrow came up with, “Good night and good luck.” Walter Cronkite had, “And that’s the way it is.” Bob Barker said, “Don’t forget to spay and neuter your pets.” If I had my own newscast and earned the privilege to inform everyone of all the terrible things that had happened that day, I’d sign off every broadcast like this: “Well, that’s enough of that.”

Despite the best wishes of a morning anchor person, sometimes a good day can be very tough to make. For instance, you might be minding your own business one day, pushing your fingers to the very limits of human ability trying to get five stars on “Sweet Child O’ Mine” on Guitar Hero II, when out of the blue your phone vibrates with a text message, letting you know that somebody wants to pass along a piece of information to you, but would prefer to spend ten minutes punching a keypad with their thumbs than actually have to talk to you. This text might not only break your string of notes and make you lose your multiplier, but it just might shatter your notions of all that is good and pure in the world.

I had just such a day recently when my buddy Derek texted me the following message: “Too bad your boy Bear Grylls is a phony. He’d be cool if he was real.” Derek was referring to the host of the Discovery Channel’s “Man vs. Wild” show and inspiration for my “What would Bear do?” tattoo.

A little exploring on the internet turned up what Derek was talking about. When Bear was supposedly sleeping in a rain forest, ostensibly trying to find his way back to civilization, he was actually sleeping in a hotel and then pretending to wake up in the woods. And it wasn’t even a Motel 6, which technically still counts as wilderness. Bear also pretended to build a raft that experts had already built for him, and used smoke machines to make volcanic gas look more threatening. Still, there are certain aspects of the show that can’t be faked, such as when he quenched his thirst by squeezing a big ball of elephant dung over his mouth or when he jumped into a frozen lake and dried himself off with snow. Clearly, the man is earning his paycheck.

Derek didn’t have to tell me the news about Bear. He could have let me live the rest of my life thinking that there are more heroes in the world than just my parents and Cal Ripken, Jr. I bet Derek goes around the mall at Christmastime telling kids the truth about Santa Claus, too. Don’t worry, young readers. Santa Claus exists every bit as much as Congressional oversight authority. What I mean by “the truth about Santa” is that the Big Guy just turned Russian.

You may have seen the news about Vladimir Putin planting a flag in the North Pole to claim the Big Slushee for Russia, which means that the North Pole’s citizens are now Russian. Da, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. And this year, if you’re a good girl, you’ll get vodka and 80’s-era fissile material in your stocking.

Well, that’s enough of that.

You can spay and neuter Mike Todd online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

To Colbert is human

They say that fame can turn you into a different person and make you expose your nether regions inadvertently while disembarking from SUVs, but I haven’t had too much of a problem with that so far. Most of the time, it’s been advertent.

I’ve tried to stay as down-to-earth as possible since my big debut on the “Colbert Report” last week, though it’s not always easy to deal with the temptations of stardom. I’m thinking about skipping all the intermediate steps and just going straight to rehab.

In case you missed it, I was the guy going “Yeah!” at the beginning of last Thursday’s episode of the “Colbert Report.” Also, I purposefully kept clapping a little bit longer than most of the other people. It seemed to me that the other clappers in the studio were just phoning it in; they clearly hadn’t spent countless hours honing their craft in front of the mirror like some of us had. After we got home and watched the DVR recording, I was hoping I’d made enough of an impact to qualify as “clapping person #87” in the closing credits, but, like so many great artists, it appears that I will go unrecognized in my time.

When my cousin Erin asked my wife Kara and I if we were interested in accompanying her and a friend to a taping of the Report in New York City, we were thrilled. Erin instantaneously jumped way up on the Best Cousin in the Universe list, supplanting my cousin Todd (whose name isn’t Todd Todd, though that would be awesome), who took me for a ride in a Corvette when I was six. Sitting there in the studio among one hundred other budding TV personalities, the air crackled with possibility and my knuckles.

“Stop cracking your knuckles!” Kara said.

“That crack was brought to you by a member of a live studio audience,” I replied.

I had to make sure my ligaments were limber for the big moment. When Stephen came out to start the show, we had a sacred obligation as members to clap like we’d never clapped before, or to clap like we’d clapped many times before, whichever way meant that we were taking our clapping seriously. When you’re a member of a live studio audience, it is also your responsibility to yell your esophagus off, making high-pitched “Wooooooo!” sounds over and over again, no matter how feminine that sound might be. Also, if you ever spent the time to learn how to do that whistle that involves sticking two fingers in your mouth, this is your time to shine.

After yelling “Wooooooo!” over and over again, I began to feel that an expansion of my repertoire was in order. I mixed it up with a few “Yeahs!”, because “Yeah!” is a sound you can make without trying to hit C above high C.

Incidentally, there were no light-up “APPLAUSE” signs to be found in the studio. When they wanted you to cheer, a guy just waved a rolled-up piece of paper over his head like he was considering bopping us all over our heads for peeing on the carpet, which I assure you we did not, mainly because there was no carpet.

The whole experience was really very cool, and Stephen Colbert is a genuinely nice guy. I can say this with confidence because I sat within fifty feet of him.

Watching the recording the next day, we slowed down the half-second camera sweep of the audience to go frame-by-frame.

“Oh, look, there I am!” Kara said.

“I think that’s a camera man,” I said, squinting.

“Really? No, I think that’s me,” she said. But really, for all we could tell from the recording, everyone in the audience that day had been built entirely of Duplo blocks.

You can say something truthy to Mike Todd online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Oh Brother, there thou art

Growing up without any brothers, I probably missed out on many things, most of them bruises. Luckily, my older sister Amy was there to pick up the slack, and as a bonus she spent the majority of her teenage years wearing down my parents’ resolve, thereby ensuring my birthright as the youngest child: relaxed disciplinary standards. This was the greatest gift she could have ever given me, and it made up entirely for her weakness in the hand-me-down department. While I appreciated the Violent Femmes and Hooters tapes she passed along, her blouses never did quite fit me right.

Last weekend, though, when my sister-in-law Jill got married, I came within a technicality’s breadth of picking up my first brother. Actually, I was pretty sure that Kris and I were officially brothers-in-law until I consulted stupid Wikipedia, which informed me that the term brother-in-law “is often misapplied to the husband of a person's sister-in-law.” Whatever, Wikipedia, you home wrecker. Who says, “brother-in-law by marriage,” anyway? That’s just lame.

So I’m still going to count it. Now that I have a little brother, I should probably do something big brotherly, like kick him out of my room or give him some nudie magazines from 1983.

Before their wedding, Kris asked some of his musically inclined friends to write a song to be performed during the reception. After he began to worry about what his friends were going to sing about him in front of his new mother-in-law, who, from what I’m told, can knock a raccoon off a trash can with her Evil Eye, he had them run the lyrics by me, which just goes to show you how hard up Kris is for a voice of reason. Kris’ friends actually showed remarkable forbearance, writing an original tune that was not nearly as innuendo-laden as Kris had feared. If you’re so inclined, you can watch the world premier of “Daddy Met Mommy on Spring Break” by searching for it on YouTube.

Kris and Jill really did meet over spring break, proving that true love can be found on or about the beer pong table. Their mutual friend’s car broke down on the way to North Carolina, stranding Kris and their buddy at Jill’s sorority house in Virginia, turning a one-night stopover into a bride-snagging extravaganza. What kind of luck is that? I’ve never had a car that had the good sense to break down at a sorority house. Mine usually wait to putter and die until I’m driving after midnight in Dueling Banjos territory.

Fortunately, being the good brother that he is, Kris asked me to be a groomsman, so I didn’t even have to dress myself for the wedding. Bridesmaids have to worry about coordinating shoes and hair and whether or not they can reach a chest size consensus to properly resolve the strap vs. no strap issue. All a groomsman has to do is call the tux rental place and tell them how tall and fat he is, and boom, he’s all set. Just add socks.

An important lesson that the other groomsman taught me is that it never gets old to call the groom “Groomzilla” in the hours before he gets married. Seriously, try it if you get the chance. A standard conversation would go something like this: “Hey Kris, can I take this beer out to the ceremony? I don’t want to leave a floater in the hotel room. No? Whatever you say, Groomzilla.”

Regardless, the world is now a better place that Jill and Kris are married, as they goad each other into becoming bigger hippies every day that they are together. Not only have they kept up the vegetarian thing for years now, but they buy organic cotton T-shirts and use vinegar in spray bottles instead of household cleanser because it’s not as abrasive to the environment. Also, vinegar tastes better on potato chips than Tilex.

You can measure Mike Todd’s inseam online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Worse homes and gardens

If you’re ever feeling like nobody’s paying attention to you, that in the whole wide world nobody is noticing you at all, you should probably consider going furniture shopping. You’ll get more attention than a World Series streaker. In fact, you’ll get so much attention that the kid in your elementary school who jumped out the first-floor window during reading class to play on the log climber will seem, in comparison, to have been completely ignored.

My wife Kara and I realized recently that we were living in a house furnished exclusively with hand-me-downs, last-minute dumpster rescues and foldable camping amenities that were never meant to be used in non-s’more settings. The only furniture we’ve ever purchased ourselves has been assembled either with an Allen wrench or the thwacking heel of Kara’s shoe. Our big black couch, the one that spent many a happy decade in my parents’ basement, has become less of couch and more of a big fluffy Habitrail for our ferret. Chopper has dug so many holes in the couch that when the cushions are removed and his head is poking out, the scene looks so much like real-life whack-a-mole that you have to resist the urge to bonk him over the head with a giant stuffed mallet.

Given the state of our furniture collection, Kara and I decided to take our first expedition to a non-Allen-wrench-based furniture store, where we were greeted at the door by Martin the Salesguy in the same way Calvin used to get greeted by Hobbes. After we dusted ourselves off, we quickly learned that salespeople do not at all attach themselves to you like leeches, as you can remove a leech with forceps. And even if you do manage to briefly shake your pursuer, you can’t shake the feeling that they are peering at you through a keyhole in a nearby armoire.

I don’t really mean to give the salespeople a hard time. They do provide the service of offering helpful observations that you, as a furniture layperson, would be unqualified to make. “That’s a couch right there,” they might say. Or, “That’s a table.” Without their help, you might accidentally stuff your dishes into an ottoman or unbutton your pants and sprawl out on a china hutch.

On subsequent trips, Kara and I experimented with different techniques to avoid being assigned a salesperson when we entered the store. If you somehow manage to sneak past the initial greeting by juking and then quickly making a hard turn, you can see out of your peripheral vision that a salesperson has deployed from the mother ship and is beginning to slowly but deliberately orbit you. No matter how quickly you move, they know all the angles to cut off your escape routes. Capture is inevitable.

We have thought about trying to enter the store through the air conditioning ducts, which in the movies are always big enough to crawl around in, but in real life would probably only be useful as a mode of transportation if you happened to be, say, a garter snake. Kara will take issue here with the term “garter snake,” as she prefers to call them “gardener snakes.” You can tell a garter snake from a gardener snake by the latter’s distinctive markings, which include floppy straw hats and tiny little wheelbarrows.

But even if you could crawl through the ductwork and drop down into the back corner of the pitch-black storeroom, as soon as you flipped on the light switch, you’d immediately be tackled by Martin, who would sit on your chest, shake your hand and say, “Welcome to Preymoor and Shenanigan’s! I’m your new best friend. Has anyone told you about our Sizzling Hot 57^th Day of Summer Sale?”

You can furnish Mike Todd with an email at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Not the brightest bulb

When replacing traditional, power-gulping light bulbs with environmentally friendly coiled fluorescent bulbs, the treehugger must move stealthily, being careful not to attract the attention of nearby spousal units. These units do not like having their natural habitats disturbed, and can be quite menacing when surprised with changes to their environment. If a spousal unit finds itself cornered by unfamiliar coiled objects, it is likely to react in unpredictable and potentially violent ways. In extreme cases, the treehugger may find itself exiting a spousal encounter with compromised reproductive capabilities.

The treehugger must therefore exercise extraordinary caution while engaging in activities related to bulb substitution, temporarily ceasing normal treehuggerish activities that could attract unwanted attention, such as munching on granola or mashing up homemade hummus to sell in jam band concert parking lots. Using a towel to dampen the sound of bulb removal helps the treehugger to remain undetected at its most vulnerable, as nowhere is the likelihood of physical harm greater than when the treehugger is caught bulb-handed.

Actually, the transition to coiled fluorescent bulbs has gone fairly smoothly in our household. My wife Kara doesn’t really care one way or the other, and two bucks is a small price to pay for the reward that being environmentally responsible ultimately bestows: a smug sense of superiority. And who can really put a price on that, anyway? I haven’t been this proud of myself since that time we played Taboo with a bunch of our friends and Kara didn’t know what the word flaccid meant.

Whatever their buzzy and cold shortcomings may be, fluorescent bulbs are perfect for those of us who revere laziness above all else. They last so long that if my buddy Josh had put one of those bulbs into a lamp when he started college, he could have still been using the same bulb when he graduated seven years later with his four-year degree.

These days, changing light bulbs is about the only way I can keep myself entertained, seeing as we don’t have phone, cable or internet at our new place yet. It’s like being stuck on Gilligan’s Island, except Kara didn’t pack any sequined dresses and nobody here knows how to make a ham radio out of coconuts and fishing line. Earlier today, we actually dusted off the phonebook and used a cell phone to call the local theater for movie times instead of just looking it up online. It was so quaint, like drinking Ovaltine and riding in a horse-drawn buggy to a milkman convention.

I keep firing up my computer, thinking that I’ll be able to find some entertainment there. A computer with no internet is every bit as entertaining as an Etch-a-Sketch with the knobs torn off. Your options are pretty much limited to opening up Excel spreadsheets or discovering that you’re still not smart enough to beat Minesweeper on expert. Or you can play sadistic solitaire games that make you click the “I’m a complete loser” button before they’ll let you close the program. Later in life, if I ever need my self-esteem taken down a peg, it’s good to know that I’ll always have FreeCell there waiting for me.

Another hobby I’ve developed in the absence of modern communications technology is punching the thermostat up when Kara’s not looking. I’ve found that our air conditioner is much more cost effective when the number on the thermostat is higher than the temperature outside. Kara seems to have developed a similar thermostat-related hobby, whereby she attempts to discover what happens to our marital relations at absolute zero. These hobbies should keep us fairly entertained through the rest of the summer. Then in the fall, we’ll trade arrows on the thermostat and start all over again.

You can emit greenhouse gases with Mike Todd online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

What would you do if I sang in tune?

“Feel my foot,” my wife Kara said to me recently, sticking her bare foot in my face. I felt the same hesitation I used to have when directed by a college buddy to “smell this.”

“Right there,” she said, pointing to a spot on the ball of her foot.

Remembering my few short years of marital training, I gave the appropriate response: “Whatever you tell me, Drill Sergeant,” and dutifully felt her foot.

“Oh, it just feels like a little callus,” I said.

“I know! I need a pedicure,” she replied. You may not know this, but some people think of pedicures as a necessity.

“Wait, you want to get rid of it? Calluses are good things. They’re like nature’s shoes,” I said.

I’ve always wanted more calluses on my feet. People who can walk barefoot across gravel driveways without even looking down deserve a special level of respect. Whenever I attempt to do something like that, I look like I’m performing an interpretive dance.

“I don’t want nature’s shoes,” Kara said. “I want pretty feet.”

We’ve both been putting our feet through quite a workout lately. Last weekend, we moved into a different house, an event that should make those who do not personally know me even happier than usual, as they weren’t called upon for the ultimate sacrifice. I felt terrible watching our friends suffering in the July heat, staggering across the front yard with oak dressers precariously swaying between them, zig-zagging so much that it was difficult to get out of their way without nearly spilling my lemonade.

Before a big move, your brain stops functioning normally. You look around at everything and think, “I don’t have that much stuff. This is going to be a snap.” But once you start lugging that stuff out the door, you realize that your possessions have been independently procreating. The only things snapping on moving days are nerves, and possibly ligaments.

The good thing about moving is that you discover some cool things you didn’t even know you had. After digging around in one of our closets, I turned to Kara and said, “Hey, since when do we have a surfboard? Did you used to surf? It even has a little stand so you can put it on display.’

“Baby, that’s an ironing board,” she said.

“Oh. That’s way less cool,” I said, tossing it back into the closet.

It’s completely unfair that our friends had to give up a weekend day to lug our stuff from one house to another, but the world is not a fair place, as evidenced by the availability of DVDs for TV shows like “Full House” and “Martin,” when “The Wonder Years,” one of the best TV shows ever created, has no DVD set and is only occasionally available on cable channels that spend the rest of their programming time running hour-long commercials for hair-loss treatments.

“Wonder Years” is one of the few entertainment experiences from childhood that withstands the test of time. The shows are still as good now as they were when I was thirteen. Time has not been so kind to the Karate Kid. As an adult, you realize that perhaps the crane kick move only really works when the bad kid runs directly into your foot with his face.

One weekend night in college, I made three of my friends watch “The Dark Crystal,” as I remembered it being the greatest movie from my childhood.

“It has these awesome live-action rabbit things that the little puppets ride around on,” I told them. Two hours later, I was the only conscious person in the room, kept awake only by my burning sense of shame. It was like an episode of Sesame Street where you didn’t learn anything other than how to forever lose your vote at Blockbuster.

You can use Mike Todd for lumbar support at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Time to move on

If you’ve noticed an increase in the number of thirty year-olds diving into your bushes and hiding under your front porch recently, please don’t be alarmed. It’s only happening because I’ve started asking my friends if they’d be willing to help me move in a couple of weeks. Now that word has started getting around, I’m more likely to bump into Jimmy Hoffa giving Elvis a piggyback ride than I am to have one of my buddies return a phone call. I’m getting the impression that my friends would rather spend my moving weekend hanging out with the tuberculosis guy.

When you’re younger, it’s easy to find people to help you move. Buy a couple of pizzas and a case of beer (preferably the kind of beer that says “premium” somewhere on the can or has “Best” right there in the name so you know that your eight dollars is buying twenty-four cans of a top-notch product), and people will flock to help you. They will do this because beer and pizza is more than fair compensation for their assistance when your first credenza is still ten years off and the largest item you own is a tie-dyed wall tapestry of Che Guevara. When all your earthly possessions fit into five Yaffa blocks, the world is your mover.

But as you get older, some of your Swedish particle-board furniture becomes replaced with furniture that your parents carved from an oak tree in 1972 for their first house, furniture made of wood so heavy that its atoms deserve a new square on the periodic table, perhaps called slippeddiskium.

The unfortunate thing is that the collective increase in the weight of your furniture is met with a corresponding decrease in the health of your friends’ backs. Even at just twenty-nine years old, I’m getting the distinct feeling that the window of using friends to conduct a cheap move is closing rapidly. It’s only a matter of time before a proposition for help with moving will elicit excuses that include the phrase “enlarged prostate.”

I’m particularly dreading moving our guest bed, which is a hand-me-down (of course) from a family friend. The bed is European queen size. You might not know this, but Europeans apparently sew their box springs and mattresses into one enormous rectangle. I’m guessing that they do this so that, if you prefer, you can drop these mattresses on anyone who might be thinking about storming your castle. In any event, I have no idea how Europeans manage to move these huge mattresses around using only Vespa scooters. They must just keep sewing Vespas together until they have an SUV.

The scariest thing about the impending move actually has nothing to do with oak furniture, gargantuan mattresses and slipped disks. We’ve had six months to sell our first house, and while we’ve come heartbreakingly close to unloading it on multiple occasions, we’re soon to be the proud, accidental owners of a weekend house. An empty, sad little weekend house that still needs to have its lawn mowed. At least, for once, our first house has a decent chance of remaining clean for two days straight.

But the good news is that since we’re going to have two houses soon, I’m pretty sure that means we’ll automatically be inducted into high society any moment now. We’ll be real estate moguls, running seminars in shopping malls and getting into fights with Rosie O’ Donnell for no reason. It’s just a matter of time before we start making friends with people who wear yellow sweaters tied jauntily about their shoulders. I’ve never had a friend named Muffy before, so that should be cool. As soon as we officially own two houses, I’m going straight to the store to buy oversized sunglasses and a Chihuahua for my purse.

You can put Mike Todd in storage online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

No independence to declare

The Fourth of July seems a fitting time to reflect upon one’s own independence, or lack thereof. This summer, my wife Kara and I are coming up on our third wedding anniversary, and so far we have avoided our ultimate fear: becoming the couple that sits at the table next to you in the restaurant for an hour, wordlessly staring at the table as if it had the next Harry Potter book written on it.

“Did you notice the couple that just left? They didn’t say a word to each other the whole time they were here,” I said to Kara last weekend.

“There was a couple sitting there?” she asked.

“Yeah. It looked like they ran out of things to talk about in 1982,” I said.

Kara and I are ever on the alert not to let that happen to us. It’s easy to get so comfortable with each other that you forget to jabber on about nothing. Also, after being married for even a short while, you build up so many common experiences that it’s easy to run out of good stories. If you want to talk about something that the other person wasn’t already there for, you’re pretty much left with whatever you did in the bathroom that morning, and Kara doesn’t have the same appreciation for those stories that my college roommates did.

In the time I’ve been married, I’ve become completely dependent on Kara for some things without even realizing it. When she disappears into dressing rooms for periods of time that allow for the evolution of new species of sea turtle, it is impossible for me to do anything productive in the men’s section while she’s gone. I have completely lost the ability to make decisions on how to clothe myself. There must have been a brief period between the times when my mom and my wife picked my clothes out for me, but I apparently learned nothing from it.

Many of my friends have more independence than they’d like. Twenty-nine is the age when life starts to resemble a middle school dodgeball game, and everyone gets just a little bit worried that they’re going to be the last ones picked.

My buddies seem to be grappling with the difficult notion of figuring out how to know when they’ve met The One. I remember a formative discussion I had with my dad on this topic when I was teenager.

“Dad, how do you know who you’re supposed to marry?” I asked him.

“Son, that’s the easiest question you’ve ever asked me. It’s whoever your girlfriend is when you’re twenty-five,” he said.

Of course he didn’t really say that. Besides being terrible advice, back when Dad was growing up, people got married when they were thirteen. They needed to reproduce quickly so they’d have more help pulling the plows and fending off Viking attacks.

Last weekend, my buddy went out on a date with a thirty-six year-old woman, an age that seems perfectly within the ballpark of acceptability for people our age, if perhaps approaching the warning track. A few short years ago, that age would have automatically triggered a barrage of Stifler’s Mom jokes, but as we get older and dates become mate interviews, age differences matter less and less. This happens because all old people look the same.

The bulk of my friends who remain fish in the sea are trying to use the internet for actual constructive purposes. Apparently, when you get bored with stealing music, you can use the internet to meet people. There are plenty of normal people out there, too, not just perverts and Dateline NBC reporters.

Once you do meet the right person, I’ve learned with Kara that the most important thing you can do to maintain domestic tranquility, other than fostering an atmosphere of mutual respect, is to make sure you don’t leave any hair stuck in your bar of soap.

You can wink at Mike Todd online at mikectodd@gmail.com.