Stripping isn’t for everyone

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

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

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

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

Before steaming a wall, you have to go over every inch with a scoring tool that pokes tiny holes in the paper. Never has so much scoring produced so little fun. But at least my wife Kara bribed me with food to get the job done. “I’ll cook if you strip,” she said. I rarely get solicited to strip, so I immediately set about stripping harder than I’ve ever stripped before.

Our steamer had this orange label stuck to it: “WARNING: This machine produces live steam and/or scalding hot water which could cause severe bodily injury.” I think it should have been a guarantee instead of a warning. After I started attempting to take the wallpaper down, I realized that I was really giving myself the third degree. The third-degree burns, I mean. I’m pretty sure that my wedding ring is now soldered to my finger.

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

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

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

But somewhere, somebody is putting up wallpaper right now, hopefully not in a place that you or I will ever live. For every sheet that comes down, one must go up. It’s required to keep the universe in balance.

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

Can’t get there from here

When you ask my dad for directions, he’s likely to respond with something like, “Oh, that’s seven miles southeast of here,” as he points towards the living room wall. What you are then to do with this information, I’m not exactly sure. I suppose it would depend on whether or not you remembered to grab the sextant when you came in off of your frigate.

My wife Kara and I won’t be bothering him or anyone else for directions anytime soon, though, now that we have Jill in our lives. Her arrival in our household marked an abrupt close to the era of asking for directions. She is the voice of American Accent (female) on the GPS unit that Santa-in-law gave to us. If you’re not familiar with GPS devices, just watch the Super Bowl commercials this year and you’ll be all caught up. A little bit dumber, but all caught up.

We chose Jill out of a list of several accents and genders. We originally thought we’d stick with Daniel, the British male voice. Right after Christmas, we drove around with Kara’s sister Sarah and her boyfriend Brad in the backseat while Daniel calmly guided us along.

“This is awesome,” Brad said. “I feel like I’m Batman and Alfred’s up there telling me where to go.”

There is something upper-crusty about having a British guy giving you directions, like you’re driving to a place where meals are served under big metal doohickeys. Unfortunately for Daniel, he was programmed to say “R.T.” instead of “route,” and he couldn’t tell the difference between an “I” and a “1,” which made him less than ideal as a guide for dispensing our particular dark brand of vigilante justice.

As Brad looked through the list of available accents, he said, “Too bad they don’t have any fun accents in here, like a drunken Irish dude or James Earl Jones.”

I pictured a family in a minivan driving down a quiet country road as their GPS unit suddenly barked, “Oy! Turn lef’, ya bloody wankah!”

Still, maybe Brad was onto something with the James Earl Jones suggestion. Who wouldn’t like to take a road trip with James Earl Jones? Also, if you called him James Jones, would anybody know who you were talking about? It would be like saying John Booth or Kermit Frog.

I’m a big fan of James Earl Jones, despite being wronged by him a decade ago. When I was a student at Penn State, he came on campus as part of a Distinguished Speakers tour. I went with some of my friends to see him in the packed auditorium. It was surreal to hear the first few words out of his mouth, like we were all starring in a movie that he was narrating.

Then he proceeded to give a canned speech on giving more money to the arts that I’m pretty sure he downloaded off the internet. As the novelty of hearing his voice wore off, the only thing one could do to stay awake was to picture him in his role as Thulsa Doom, evil tyrant and beheader of Conan the Barbarian’s mom.

At the end of his speech, he allowed time for a short Q&A. A brave student walked up to the microphone in the aisle and asked, “Could you say ‘Luke, I am your father’ for us?”

We all leaned forward in our seats in anticipation. James Earl Jones hesitated for a moment and then said, “Oh, you could do it better than me,” before moving along to the next, much more boring, question. The curtain behind him billowed with the disappointed exhales of a thousand college students.

Regardless, it would be really cool to have him tell me the fastest way to the mall. I can just imagine how awesome it would sound to turn on the car and hear him say, “It’s seven miles southeast of here.

You can tell Mike Todd where to go at mikectodd@gmail.com.

When a house becomes an igloo

The day before guests were set to start arriving for the biggest party we’d ever attempted to throw, my wife Kara and I came home to find our first floor entirely without heat. Apparently, we had done something to anger the universe, like not inviting it.

“What’s the thermostat set to?” Kara asked, casting a suspicious eye on me as she hugged her jacket tighter. I have been known, on occasion, to turn down the heat without the express written consent of other parties in the house, parties who think that a heating system should regularly be cranked up to such a degree that it can perform other duties, such as browning potatoes on the kitchen counter.

“I swear, it wasn’t me this time,” I said, looking at the display panel on the thermostat. It was registering 49 degrees, a temperature perfect for preserving meat but not marital relations.

I pulled together all of my knowledge about heating, cooling and refrigeration systems to perform a complicated diagnostic procedure known in the business as “flicking the thermostat and cussing.” After that, the only thing left to do was shrug, cuss a little bit more and call a professional.

I’m always a little hesitant to call in for backup. Contractors can pretty much do anything they want once they’re invited into your home, like old college friends and vampires. But this was an emergency, and we were feeling fortunate to have a cavalry to call.

As we waited for the repair van to show up, icicles began to form on our vast collection of remote controls, each of which has exactly two buttons that we ever actually press. The temperature continued to drop. Packs of wolves tracked elk across our couch. While we had been intending to vacuum the entire house just before the party, it was becoming increasingly evident that we’d need a Zamboni instead.

After the contractor showed up and poked around for a few minutes, he used his best funeral director voice to inform us that we probably had a frozen pipe in our baseboard system.

“I expect there’s already some damage. We’ll have to get in there and warm up the pipes individually to flush out the blockage. It’s 600 dollars for the first two hours, 250 for each hour after that,” he said. “And we’ll probably have to cut into your walls.”

A single tear froze on my cheek. But without switching to a heating system based on whale blubber, we saw few other options. As the contractor and his crew worked in the basement, I went back to cleaning while Kara chopped vegetables in the kitchen with her jacket on.

Few things in life are universal, but it’s a pretty fair indication that good things are not happening when a contractor working in your basement comes running up the stairs and barreling through your kitchen, yelling, “Follow me and bring towels!”

The blockage and corresponding burst pipe had been in our laundry room. When the pipe was heated up and the ice melted, gallons of water poured onto the floor, down the wall and into the basement. As we ran into the laundry room to discover our newly installed (if somewhat shallow) indoor pool, a house spider surfed across the floor on a dryer sheet.

The water, having been enclosed in our heating system for quite some time, had a distinct aroma.

“It smells like asparagus pee,” Kara’s friend Curry, who had come early to help us get ready, observed as she draped towels over the mess. Fortunately for us, the cleanup went pretty smoothly. The contractors fixed the pipe in short order. We have yet to find out if our homeowners’ policy will cover any of the expense, but it has been my general observation that insurance doesn’t cover things that actually happen.

At least the heat was on before party time. Next time, we’re inviting the universe.

You can cuss and flick Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Beware the chocolate fountain

If we didn’t occasionally have guests over, our house would probably end up looking like one of the houses you see on the news about once a year, where police spend hours carrying out armloads of mangy-looking cats through the splintered front door after the neighbors report a horrible smell.

Of course, I’m exaggerating somewhat. Our house is unlikely to make the news without somehow being involved in the paternity of Britney’s sister’s baby. Still, I’m especially sensitive to how clean we can get the place before our friends start arriving this weekend.

Apparently, early January is the time to have a party. Everyone is just sitting around, trying to figure out how soon they can start pretending that their gym memberships have expired, waiting for an invitation. Several people we haven’t seen since our wedding three years ago accepted the invitation, and they’re not even going to get a nice meal out of it this time. We were counting on having a very low acceptance rate, but about triple the partygoers we expected have decided to matriculate.

The last time we had a party this big, it was really just a pre-party for the night’s main event, a show at local hotel ballroom put on by an X-rated hypnotist, a man whose livelihood depended almost entirely upon the willing suspension of disbelief and the ready availability of bananas.

This time, though, we do have one ace up our respective sleeves: the chocolate fountain we just borrowed from my parents. I’m a little anxious about using it without adult supervision, though. The last time my parents used the fountain, my friends offered to help clean it up afterwards. With the fountain almost entirely disassembled, my buddy Rob wanted to see what would happen if he turned it on again. The center piece spun around wildly, flinging gobs of chocolate indiscriminately about the kitchen. Those standing closest to Rob’s experiment looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger when he covered himself in mud so that the Predator couldn’t use infrared vision to find him.

Of course, I have no idea where we’ll put the fountain even if we do get it working. After perusing dining room sets, we decided we really didn’t want to afford one yet, so the dining room has been functioning as our trash room since we moved in. The trash room has turned out to be much more useful than a dining room anyway. I think trash rooms are the way of the future, like robotic dogs and Swiffer WetJets. Not many people know this, but Swiffer WetJets do not actually employ jet engine technology. Yet.

My parents have a trash room, too, though they call it the “storage room.” The storage rooms goes through its complete life cycle in about a decade; Dad will spend ten years filling it with karate pads and broken dehumidifiers, and Mom will spend a weekend throwing everything out. I don’t like it when the storage room is clean. It seems out of balance. It’s much more entertaining when you need a torch, a whip and a fedora hat to retrieve the hot tray. Besides, a trash room is nothing to be ashamed of. In college, I had an entire trash apartment.

You have to be careful how much junk you keep around, though. It’s a fine line between being a packrat and ending up on Oprah with the cameraman zooming in on verklempt audience members as the slideshow of your house rolls on.

At the very least, having a party is a good excuse to get the trash room cleaned out. And the party is likely to be a success as long as you don’t run out of game pieces, which is what my brother-in-law Chris calls bottles of beer.

“Can you get me another game piece?” he’ll say.

“A what?” people will ask.

“A game piece. For the game of Drink Beer,” he replies.

That sounds like a fun game. We’ll have to try it out this weekend, if we can’t find Scattergories in the trash room.

You can send your regrets (about reading this column) to Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

The Ghost of Christmas Presents

Like Ebenezer Scrooge, I’ve learned some important lessons this holiday season. For instance, if you see the back half of a good parking space at Home Depot on a Saturday, that’s because there’s a big orange shopping cart in the front half. I think I also learned something about caring for your fellow man by giving him a prize turkey, but I can’t recall the details.

This Christmas was much more relaxing than I’m used to, as my wife Kara has finally trained me to get our Christmas shopping done early enough to forego the usual ritual of calling stores on Christmas Eve to find out what time they close. That’s a bad feeling, walking through the mall frantically, knowing that you can’t leave without finding a present for some important family member, when suddenly the metal grates start to come down over the store entrances one-by-one, trapping you in the middle of the mall and narrowing your gift-giving options down to the Piercing Pagoda, the Verizon booth and Dippin’ Dots.

The Dippin’ Dots stand must be the saddest place in the mall, besides maybe the dark labyrinth of hallways leading to the restrooms. I’ve never seen anyone actually buying Dippin’ Dots. The sign reads, wishfully: “Dippin’ Dots: Ice Cream of the Future.” This sign hangs over the lone dude behind the register, who dutifully tries his best to stay awake, patiently waiting for the future to arrive. Every now and again, curiosity will get the better of me, and I’ll peer over the glass to see various vats of colorful beads. Each flavor looks, in its own special way, like the filling of a bean bag chair. Perhaps it’s due to my lack of business acumen, but it seems to me that ice cream is much more likely to be the Ice Cream of the Future.

Now that Christmas is over, it’ll be a while before I have a need to head back to the mall, though I think I might already be experiencing withdrawal. My eyes have become used to the twinkling displays of Christmas spirit, a spirit that can be measured in good will towards men and/or kilowatt-hours. And it’s tough to fight the urge to give my credit card to strangers, or to keep myself from walking on dawdling people’s heels, waiting for the cue from Kara to spring around either side of them and reunite on the far side. The worst part is knowing that I’ll have to wait a full three months before the Christmas displays are rolled back out.

While there are many things I’ll miss about the mall, I certainly won’t miss Kara saying, “Hold this. I’ll be back in a minute,” as she hands me her purse and disappears into the dressing room, ostensibly trying on clothes to make sure they’ll look good on somebody else. If I was a smart person, I’d run out at that moment and plant some corn by the shrubs at the mall entrance, entertaining myself with some subsistence farming as the seasons rolled by in her absence. After the harvest, I’d have plenty of time to sit back with some fresh corn on the cob, picking my teeth and pondering the continued existence of wool sweaters.

You never hear anybody say: “I love itchy wool sweaters. The more itch, the better. If you can’t find any itchy enough, just cut three holes in a burlap sack and give that to me for Christmas.” Yet the mall is filled with wool sweaters. Who is buying them? It’s almost like the stores think that wool is the Sweater of the Future.

In any event, it’s nice to slow down and spend time with family instead of throngs of shoppers, even though Kara and I end up driving all over the Eastern Seaboard to see everybody. During the holiday break, if you took a picture of me and Kara, we’d show up as animated red arrows stretching our way across a road atlas. Still, it beats being the Dippin’ Dots guy.

Should old acquaintance be forgot, you can still email Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Rubbing elbows, flossing noses

The bottom of the invitation to our neighbors’ Christmas party read like this: “We ask that each person please bring a fun activity to share: a joke, a song, a game, a skit, a story.”

Of course, my wife Kara and I figured that this part of the invitation didn’t really apply to us. We’re special. We also don’t feel like we should have to stop when new stop signs are installed. Once you’re used to driving on a road without stopping, you should be grandfathered in.

Instead, we decided to bring a bottle of wine, thinking that it could, in a stretch, count as a game. “It’s a little game we like to call ‘Social Lubrication,’” we’d say.

As we got up to leave for the party, I walked to the front door while Kara headed for the garage.

“You seriously want to drive there?” I asked. “We’re only going two houses up.”

“You’re not the one wearing heels. It’ll feel like three miles in these things,” she said. It’s true that her heels were tall enough that, had they been made of wood and hidden under flashy silk trousers, they would have been excellent props for a Cirque de Soleil performance. Unfortunately, neither one of us can juggle flaming objects, except for the occasional failed batch of garlic toast.

“But we haven’t even left yet. You could still put on shoes that allow you to wear them and walk at the same time,” I suggested.

Eventually, I “won” the discussion, but winning is a relative term when your wife is angrily clopping ahead of you down the driveway. Over the past few years of marriage, we’ve found that the important thing isn’t THAT you argue, but HOW you argue. We argue so well that we made up before we got to the mailbox.

The party turned out to be an intimate gathering of very friendly people, wonderful for getting to know our neighbors but terrible for hiding one’s lack of preparation. After a few minutes, the discussion turned to the activities everyone had brought, with the judges all agreeing that a bottle of wine was very thoughtful but that we’d have to come up with something else. Slowly, we began going around the circle, with Kara and I left to go last.

One couple brought a Christmas trivia game. Here’s one for you: “In the Little Drummer Boy, what kept time?” If you thought “a metronome,” too, it’s a good thing we weren’t on the same team. I still don’t understand how “ox and lamb” are supposed to be musically inclined, but that’s less surprising to me than the fact that somebody actually knew the answer.

The host of the party whipped out a banjo and played a medley of holiday songs from Thanksgiving through New Year’s. He played it like a pro, like he’d just come back from a gig played behind chicken wire.

I sat there wondering how I’d gotten to be thirty years old without developing a single useful talent. We didn’t have time for everyone to watch me play Elder Scrolls IV for five straight hours without taking a single bathroom break.

Kara and I had to come up with a party trick, and fast. I was imagining future conversations between our neighbors: “Whatever happened to that couple down the street?”

“Oh, you mean the talentless buffoons?”

I seriously considered the trick I’d seen on the Late Show where the guy snorted dental floss and brought it back through his mouth. Could a nasal floss be executed successfully on the first try? It seemed worth a shot.

In the end, we printed off one of my old columns and Kara performed a dramatic reading, which, despite the source material, she pulled off quite well, really nailing the “my wife Kara” parts and getting us both off the hook. In retrospect, they probably would have preferred the nasal floss.

Your email can jingle all the way to Mike Todd’s inbox at mikectodd@gmail.com.

A stressful chapter finally closes

There are many things I would have preferred to do rather than trying to sell our house through the wintertime, such as hiking the Appalachian Trail in my wife’s “going out” heels or being a gladiator with a losing record.

Everyone knows you can’t sell a house in the winter. That’s because, even when it comes to a tough buyers’ market like the one we have right now, every real estate agent knows the secret to making a sale: balloons. Balloons, especially when tied to roadside signs, hypnotize buyers with their gentle bobbing, compelling purchases that otherwise never would have occurred. Used car salesmen know this secret as well, though they diversify their offerings with plastic flags and giant inflatable men with waggling arms. The concept is the same: mesmerize the buyer with colorful moving objects so that they don’t notice the water damage or the cracked headlight.

When the weather turns cold, though, real estate agents’ most powerful weapon is neutralized. Balloons hang limply, if at all, signifying a long, bitter stretch until St. Patrick’s Day, when the homebuyer drunkenly crawls out of its hole, seeing its shadow and waiting another six weeks before getting pre-approved for a mortgage.

Fortunately, my wife and I narrowly avoided this fate, with a closing scheduled for tomorrow afternoon, two weeks short of a year from when we began selling. If everything goes according to plan, our long-vacant albatross will finally be hung around somebody else’s neck. I mean that in the nicest way, of course, and honestly, I don’t even know how you hang an albatross, what with all the wing flapping and carrying on that would likely ensue. Regardless, if everything doesn’t go according to plan, please be advised that my next column may be a Caps Locked expletive repeated 650 times.

They call it “closing” because “closing the most stressful chapter of your life” takes up too much space on the paperwork. This will likely be the last closing I’ll ever attend, because if we ever have to move again, I think we’ll just peel out of the driveway in the moving truck with the house ablaze behind us.

If you’ve never been to a closing, it’s really an interesting display of civic pride. Pretty much the entire community shows up to ensure, in the spirit of brotherhood and fellowship, that every last cent has been whittled off your hide. You could walk through the monkey cage at the zoo with bunches of bananas in your pants and you would have fewer hands in your pockets than you do at a closing. Representatives of the real estate companies, the title company, the lending companies, Uncle Sam, Danny Bonaduce and his mom all show up to get their cut. Even so, we’re thrilled to have gotten this far along in what has been a gut-wrenching process, and I feel very lucky to have the opportunity to jinx it all by writing about it before the deed, as it were, is done.

When one of my co-workers found out that we had finally gotten a closing date, she asked, “Do you have any pointers on selling a house? We’ve been trying for a few months now.”

You’d think that with nearly a year of experience, I might have had something worthwhile to tell her. After all, while selling a house in this market is difficult, selling a house with only one bathroom is even more difficult, especially when that bathroom would easily lose a playground fight with a broom closet.

After mulling over every lesson I’d learned in the past year, I said, “Is burning it down an option?” OK, not really. My real advice was to drop the price, whatever it was.

“What about refinishing the floors?” she asked.

“Drop the price.”

“Baking cookies before an open house?”

“Drop the price.”

Of course, even dropping the price doesn’t always help. Until balloon season rolls around again, though, the best option is probably the inflatable dude with the waggling arms.

You can pop Mike Todd’s balloon at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Holiday electricity in the air (but not the bulbs)

As my wife Kara and I pulled our musty Christmas decorations out of their giant Tupperware sarcophagus last week, we found light strands so tangled that they resembled the way, given a piece of construction paper and a crayon, a small child might depict a plate of spaghetti. It reminded me of the old adage about wrestling with pigs: when you wrestle with Christmas lights, you both get knotted up, but the Christmas lights enjoy it.

Just as I was about to ask Kara if she had given up halfway through an attempt to knit me a sweater out of the lights, I remembered the last time I had seen them, about a year ago, when I indiscriminately balled up the cords and chucked them into the storage crate, rushing to get back to making absolutely sure that, as the man of the house, all the zombies in the PlayStation2 had been properly beheaded, thinking, “Eh well, I’ll deal with the lights next year.”

Last Year Me is always doing things to make life harder for This Year Me, like making little to no effort to solve the ever-worsening Bald Spot Dilemma and buying stock in companies whose executive leadership now spends much of its time making license plates and trying not to drop the soap.

As Kara worked to untangle the lights, I set about the much easier task of assembling our artificial pre-lit Christmas tree. Fresh cut trees have some things going for them, but you have to buy a new one every year. An artificial tree stays with you forever, like your first kiss or your creditors.

When I plugged our tree in, about three percent of the lights came on. If the world was a fair place, the overhead lights at the factory where they make Christmas light strands would work just like the strands themselves. A bulb would burn out in the second floor men's room, plunging the whole factory into darkness. The workers would go around with flashlights in their teeth, testing every bulb in the place until they ultimately concluded that the entire factory needed to be replaced.

After countless attempts to reason with the lights, we decided that the only way to get the tree working again would be to replace every non-working bulb. We went out and bought a cheap strand, intending to rip out its parts and patch up our tree like Frankenstein’s monster. As I removed the new lights from the box, I noticed this warning attached to the cord: “Handling the cord on this product will expose you to lead, a chemical known to the State of California to cause cancer.”

Nothing gets me more in the Christmas spirit than exposure to known carcinogens. Luckily, I don’t live in California, so I’m probably immune, but it just seems a little rude that California wouldn’t tell all the other states. You’d think it would be neighborly to at least mention it to Nevada.

Even though the other states haven’t quite made up their minds about whether or not lead should be sprinkled over your breakfast cereal, it might be a good idea to go ahead and take bacon, lead chip and tomato sandwiches off the menu. Besides, we really shouldn’t be wasting all that lead when Mattel still has so many more toys to make. It wouldn’t be fair to the kids.

In the end, our tree refused to light up even after we’d spent an hour transplanting bulbs over from the new cord. The tree just sat there, dark and glum, taunting us with its few functional lights. The good news is that it is now even more obvious that Kara is the light of my life. None of the other ones work.

You can play reindeer games (like Monopoly) with Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Dodging the Christmas Cat

Over Thanksgiving dinner last week, my wife Kara got caught giving me the Signal.

The Signal is a special smile that she reserves just for me, a smile that she sneaks across crowded dinner tables to deliver a message that is to be received discreetly, lest some unsuspecting diner intercept the communication and conclude that Kara is improperly signaling to someone other than her husband the desire to have answered that most intimate of questions: “Do I have anything in my teeth?”

We’ve developed a system that allows me to reply using a series of hand signals, like I’m her third base coach. I’ll point to my left to let her know that she should start her search to the right of center. Before I could wave Kara home last week, though, my sister-in-law’s boyfriend Brad said, “What are you guys doing?”

Brad is in his first year of dental school, so he’s especially attuned to matters of the mouth. We shouldn’t have been so careless. It’s like we were trying to embezzle in front of an accounting major.

While Brad’s official dental education has just begun, he can already throw around words like buccal and occlude, making him the most knowledgeable dental person I’ve ever seen without an appointment. He spent a good chunk of the weekend rotating around a 3-D model of the human mouth on his laptop, presumably because he didn’t have Warcraft III installed.

A perk of being in dental school, besides getting to participate in spirited debates with proctology students over which end is better, is that industry reps shower budding dentists with free oral care products. Brad gets all sorts of free stuff from dental industry reps, making him a really good person to know if you, like many people I know, use toothpaste.

The dental theme also makes Christmas presents from Brad way less scary than presents from my sister, Lindsay Lohan* (name changed to generate more web hits). She recently moved into a Manhattan apartment with her significant other, with each of them bringing enough cats to start a feline Brady Bunch. The kitty territory wars began shortly thereafter. Lindsay Lohan has been trying to unload her field general on various family members ever since.

“Hey, Buddy, can I ask you something?” she’ll ask.

“Dude, I don’t want the cat,” I’ll respond.

“Think it over. I have to go call Mom now,” she’ll say. Lindsay Lohan’s a lawyer, so it’s only a matter of time before she cracks one of us. Until then, the joke around the family is that Lindsay Lohan is going to show up for Christmas bearing a large meowing gift box with airholes in the side.

With Brad, though, you don’t have to worry that his presents will shred your couch and soak your carpet. It is much more likely that they will leave you feeling minty fresh.

When he intercepted the Signal, I said, “Sorry, we were trying to be sneaky. Kara wanted me to check her teeth.”

My sister-in-law Sarah said, “I can’t understand Brad’s directions when I have something in my teeth. He’s always like, ‘You have something stuck between numbers six and seven.’ I don’t know what numbers my teeth are.”

Brad said, “You can count them with your tongue. They go from one to sixteen on top and seventeen to thirty-two on the bottom,” confirming my previously held suspicion that the average human head contained somewhere between twenty and forty teeth.

Really, Brad’s system was much better than the hunt-and-pick method Kara and I had developed, and it was nice to hang around with someone who was learning actual useful skills. If I were Brad, though, I’d be spending a lot of sleepless nights deciding what I’d do when the time finally came and I had to make a yes or no call on Trident. If you voted your conscience and went the wrong way, would the other 80% of dentists still hang out with you?

You can punch Mike Todd right in the number eight at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Way off baseboard

As the furnace man packed up to leave yesterday after a routine maintenance appointment, I asked him if there was anything he might be able to do about the baseboards clanking in our bedroom. Since the weather turned cold, my wife Kara and I have been trying to sleep in the acoustic equivalent of a steel mill.

“Oh, that’s just thermal expansion,” he said, shrugging. It was the same way a doctor might say, “Oh, that’s just a little cold,” indicating that you’ll be doing without the fistful of antibiotics you’d been hoping for.

I guess thermal expansion is just something you have to learn to live with, like bunions and neoconservatives. Kara and I are both light sleepers, by virtue of the fact that she is a light sleeper and an adept shin kicker. The clanking of the baseboards never fails to wake her, reflexively launching her heat-seeking foot in my direction and ending my recurring dream of being an apprentice blacksmith. If we keep going on like this, it could be ages before I get my own anvil.

I guess if we had to look at the bright side, you never know when baseboards are going to start making a racket in the middle of the night, which probably makes them excellent training for having kids.

We spent sixty bucks on a sound machine at Brookstone, the store in the mall where currency is converted into vibrating chairs, tiny useless sandboxes and CD-playing golf bags. The box said that the machine was designed for infants by a real live doctor with a stethoscope and everything. Of all the sounds it made, Kara’s favorite was the one that simulated riding in a car. That sealed the deal for us. Automobile engines are like Valium to her. I haven’t taken a road trip with a conscious passenger in four years.

Now when we go to sleep, it sounds like we’re driving through a steel mill. My dreams usually involve swerving to avoid falling girders. It’s all very relaxing.

Of course, none of this will matter over the Thanksgiving holiday, as we’ll be taking our show on the road, spending time with family, reaching new heights of gluttony and contributing to the whole affair with the best thing we know how to cook, which is a bottle of wine.

It’s important to pick the right wine for a large family gathering. Oenophiles (which are people who like wine, not people who shouldn’t be left alone with your oens) already know that there are two basic kinds of wine: bottled and boxed. Sure, bottles are classier and don’t require Dixie cups since you can drink directly out of the container, but a lot of people don’t realize that once a box of wine is about halfway kicked, you can rip it open and drink directly from the foil pouch inside like it’s a giant Capri Sun.

Nobody even drank wine until the movie ‘Sideways” came out a few years ago. It’s pretty silly that the movie had any influence at all, considering that it romantically paired Paul Giamatti with Virginia Madsen. In the real world, you’d be more likely to see a hobbit fleeing a horde of Uruk-hai through Bed, Bath and Beyond than a pairing with a point spread like that.

For this Thanksgiving, one in which we’re fortunate enough to have both of our families getting together, we’ll probably bring a bottle of Cabernet, though we’re not fancy enough to know the proper way to swish it around and declare that is has a nutty bouquet with a floral, almost bodacious finish. Besides, we know my parents like that kind, since they’re the ones who gave us the bottle in the first place.

You can help Mike Todd get the cranberry sauce out of the can at mikectodd@gmail.com.

The highlights of winter

Last week, my mom highlighted her hair, then decided to exercise some futility by sitting at the dinner table with Dad, waiting to see how long it would take him to notice. Of course, the man was more likely to spontaneously combust.

After a few minutes of polite conversation, Mom finally gave up and said, “My hair was brown this morning and now it’s blonde.”

“Oh, and it looks good!” he said, realizing he’d failed an exam he didn’t know he was taking.

“Would you even notice if I was sitting here naked?” Mom asked.

“Sounds like an interesting experiment,” Dad replied.

I know about this conversation because they described it to me after I called to tell them that I’d just returned from purchasing the best snowblower in the universe. I can always count on my parents to feign interest when I feel the need to regale someone with tales of exploits in lawn and gardenry. Of course, you wouldn’t normally apply a snowblower to either your lawn or your garden, at least not on purpose, but that’s still the section of the store where you find them.

Standing there with my hands on the controls of the floor model, a machine that had enough horsepower to send the snow back from whence it came, I wanted to make that simian “Arrr Arrrh Arrrh” sound Tim Allen used to make in the show “Home Improvement,” before he headed off to a useful career of warning people about which movies were terrible by being in them.

“Dude, it has a headlight,” my wife Kara said approvingly. She was already having visions of drinking hot cocoa by the window, watching the snow magically disappear off the driveway as the three-year-old price tag dangled from her snow shovel in the garage.

Kara would tell you that the previous sentence is a gross misrepresentation of the truth, that she has done plenty of snow shoveling, especially that time that it snowed a foot while I was away on business and she shoveled for hours just to clear me a parking spot. That is, if she had a newspaper column. But she doesn’t, so we’ll just have to take my word.

Now that we’re prepared with a machine that will probably remove at least one of my digits during its lifetime, we probably won’t get any snow at all this winter. Who knows about the weather anymore? At least it’s already gotten a little chilly out. Last year, our Thanksgiving gravy needed to be SPF 15.

As excited as I am about ending the relationship with my snow shovel (I just felt like I was doing all the work), I do have reservations about bringing another piece of complicated doodaddery into my life. The other ones already constitute enough of a destabilizing force in our house.

Since moving to our new place, we’ve noticed that our cellphone coverage hearkens to a simpler time, before the invention of cell towers, back when gas was cheap and you could drive around flipping people the bird all day long without a thought to your personal safety. Our house is where cell signals go to die, if they show up at all.

Sitting with my phone beside me, silent, all day, it will buzz all of a sudden to alert me that I have a new voicemail.

“That’s funny, I would have expected perhaps some sort of ringing sound to signify an incoming call,” I will say.

But the service will be too poor to pick up the voicemail. The phone will say this: “You have one new voicemail. Message one: ‘Hey, Mike, this is crrkrkrkrk, I juscrkkrkrr important that you knew crkrcrrckr is dead.”

Several minutes later, Kara will walk by the doorway to find me kneeling over the phone, trying to find a neck on it to strangle.

“Your hair looks nice,” I will say, just to be safe.

You can pass the gravy to Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.