Stepladder to heaven

Right up until I fell off the stepladder, I felt like things were going pretty well.

The previous few days had built up my confidence, with our bedroom torn asunder exactly as we’d planned.  Our furniture sat stacked in the hallway with a thin aisle running down the middle, just like a hoarder’s house, except with a few less balled-up burger wrappers festooning the proceedings.

We were undoing the damage done by our house’s previous owners, the ones who decided that there’s no such thing as too much yellow floral wallpaper, especially if that wallpaper features berry clusters with little birds flying around.  Three years ago, when scraping all the wallpaper off our bedroom walls, sending it back from whence it came, I’d damaged the drywall underneath, leaving thousands of pock marks and small tears.

“You won’t be able to see those when I’m done,” I assured my wife Kara before applying two coats of primer and three coats of paint, each serving to further magnify the damage.

To make it worse, we’d chosen to paint the room beige (well, “dune white,” but beige) for some reason, and it already had a tan ceiling.  By the time I finished, our bedroom looked like the inside of a cardboard box that a cat had fought its way out of.

After a few years, we finally decided that the time had come to fix it.  Plus, our youngest son Zack was finally sleeping through the night, so I needed something else to ruin my life.

“I hear wallpaper’s making a comeback,” Kara said.

“No way, never,” I replied. 

Wallpaper’s not something to joke about.  If you want to change a painted room, you can do it in two days.  If the room is wallpapered, after two days, you’ll still be in the initial phases of steaming, scraping, picking, scratching and crying.  Plus, all those tools you’ll need to acquire: buckets of paste, scissors, a trowel, a trident, cloven hooves, etc. 

“You need to skim coat the walls,” our friend Kiera said.  She’s helped several people fix up their fixer-uppers, and has developed the unfortunate reputation of being really good at drywall repair. 

“Sweet!  How do I get started?” I asked.

“Some people say it’s easier to rip the drywall down and start over,” she replied, which helped to give me some perspective on the tribulations ahead.   

Kiera came over to help us get started.  When it comes to levels of friendship, they go like this, in ascending order: Friends who lend you tools, friends who help you move, friends who take a bullet for you, friends who skim coat your walls.

“I can’t believe that this is how it’s done,” I said as we slathered white joint compound across the walls with putty knives.  It was like spreading peanut butter onto bread, except the bread was the size of our bedroom, and the knife didn’t get any bigger.

“Do you want me to tell everyone how bad you are at this, so they’ll stop asking you to help?” I offered to Kiera.  Her wall looked flat and perfect.  Mine looked like the inside of a Thomas’ English Muffin.         

The next day, I began sanding down the dried joint compound, which brought me two steps from the top of our six-foot stepladder.  I lightly leaned against the wall with my shoulder, which applied enough sideways force to my feet to send the stepladder shooting off to the side.  This wasn’t a wobble.  It was a capsize.

My life flashed before my eyes, and the months I spent playing Warcraft weren’t nearly as interesting as they seemed at the time.

The stepladder crashed to the ground.  Our older son Evan cried from his bed at the noise.  Kara ran upstairs to see what just happened.  She found me standing beside the ladder, shaking my head.

“Pretty sure I’m supposed to be dead right now,” I said. 

Life is too short for wallpaper.  And sometimes, because of it.
           
You can patch over Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Fahrenheit 104

Wait, you mean I didn't write a column last week?  I just turned in this old one from 2008?  Man, that was lazy.  Actually, I'm blaming Zack.  He had the audacity to run up a fever of 104 on a deadline day.  Some babies are just selfish like that.  (He's all better now.)

Still, I don't have a new column to post.  Perhaps you will forget about that if I throw some cute kid pics out here?  It's worth a shot.

Wine and gummy bears

“We should call,” my wife Kara said, using her wineglass to motion toward the phone in my pocket.

“Yes, we should,” I agreed, dangling my feet off the dock for another moment, squinting as the sun danced off the water.

Even though we are parents with two young children, we were finding that it is entirely possible to have a nice, relaxing weekend away from home, as long as you dump the kids off at their grandparents’ house on the way there.

“They’re probably putting the kids in bed right now.  Seriously, we should call,” Kara repeated, taking another sip.

Mustering my energy, I leaned over far enough to extract the phone from my pocket.  By that point, my liver had just about caught up on the backlog it had incurred during the day’s wine tour. 

A couple of months ago, I’d decided that my years of hanging out with friends were over, at least at venues that did not prominently feature bouncy castles.  The regular reader(s) of this column might recall that my recent night out with friends in New York City ended with a party transpiring around my prone body at 4am as I tried to sleep on the bare mattress of a hotel pull-out couch.   I’m just lucky nobody tried to use me as a bottle opener.

But on this wine tour, Kara and I actually got to relax together and reconnect with friends, something we haven’t done since around, and I’m just spitballing here, June 15, 2009, the day our first son was born and our social lives died.

The day also attempted to be educational, but I did my best not to learn anything.

“This selection was aged in a steel-lined tank, which gives it a nutty bouquet and a finish of middle-aged orangutan droppings,” the bartender would say, holding out the bottle and delivering a brief monologue before pouring a thimble-full into our glasses. 

I suppose it’s important to know about wines before you drink them, but the wine-tasting ritual seems a bit like going trick-or-treating and having the person who answers the door holding the treat in the air just above your outstretched pillowcase, telling you about the candy’s origins.

“This Three Musketeers bar was milled in a galvanized vat, which gives it a robust structure and full-bodied complexity.  You’ll also notice its rustic nose, subtle vegetal undertones and lively nougat.”

My feeling is that it’s candy, and that’s good enough for me.  You put it in the bag, I’ll make it disappear.

But this day wasn’t really about wine.  It was about seeing friends and leaving responsibilities behind, just for a little while.

At the end of the day, on the end of the dock, Kara and I excused ourselves to check in with our real lives.

“How was your day with Grandma and Grandpa?” Kara asked.

“I had chocolate pudding and vanilla ice cream with blue sprinkles and gummy bears,” Evan said, apparently not scarred by our absence.

“He also had corn-on-the-cob and meatballs!” Grandma chimed in.

“And I played Candy Land and I won twice.  I’m going to win at Candy Land forever,” he said, a bold statement by someone yet to be acquainted with his father’s cupcake-crushing Candy Land skills.

Kara and I smiled, chit-chatting with our son until our entertainment value wore off, which took about three minutes.

“Bye!” Evan said abruptly, then his footsteps pattered off until they were inaudible.

The next day, we’d pick our kids up and swing them over our heads, glad to hear their laughter, and even their shrieking, again.  Until then, though, someone needed to watch that sunset.

You can ask Mike Todd to take a long walk off a short dock at mikectodd@gmail.com.

…and all I got was this postcard

“Is it here yet?  Is it here yet?” my son Evan screeched from the backseat as I pulled the mailman’s daily recycle-bin-filler out of the mailbox.

“Children’s Place, Toys R’ Us, Gymboree.  Man, the marketers really have us pegged,” I said, throwing the coupons and catalogs into the empty passenger seat.

“But is it here yet?  Is it here?” he yelled.

“Bill, junk, bill, junk,” I replied.  I paused, looking at one envelope that read: “IMPORTANT!  TIME-SENSITIVE DOCUMENTS ENCLOSED!”

In general, there is an inverse relationship between how important a piece of mail looks and how important it actually is.  If it’s an offer for a new credit card with an interest rate that’s higher than your final grade in calculus, it’ll have 72-point font stamped across the envelope: “YOU’D BETTER OPEN THIS, OR THE KITTEN GETS IT!”

Every now and again, they’ll trick me into opening one.  Earlier this year, as tax documents were trickling into the mailbox, a credit card offer fooled me into thinking it contained actual life-relevant information.

“Oh, you got me, Capital One, you devil,” I said.  Every time I open a credit card offer, the company scores a point on me.  Also, somewhere, an angel gets its wings repossessed.

If an envelope contains something you actually want, like an insurance check, or credit card rewards, it’ll come in a nondescript envelope crammed into the grocery store circular.

“Nothing to see here, Occupant.  Please discard before I waste any more of your time,” it will say.

“IS IT HEEERE?” Evan yelled again.

I reached the end of the pile.  No postcard from Mommy.

“No, bud, I’m sorry, it’s not,” I replied.

“But I want it to be here!” he yelled, clearing up any ambiguity on his position re: postcard acquisition.

With my wife Kara travelling on business for four days, I’d become a temporary single parent, which allowed me to experience all the relaxation and bliss that single-parenthood had to offer.  But since it wasn’t offering any, I hung out with my kids instead.

“Unleash the hounds!” I’d say as I unbuckled the boys from their car seats each evening.  They’d tear around the house, ramming things with their heads until dinnertime.

“Just don’t do anything that won’t heal before Mommy gets home,” I’d advise while the chicken nuggets spun around in the microwave.  

“Come find me!” Evan would yell, sitting in the middle of the living room, his legs sticking out from under a blanket.  I’d run over to him right away, because if you don’t find him quickly enough, he’ll start running around with the blanket over his head, content to bounce off whatever surface he hits first.

Somehow, we all survived, though our daily mailbox routine was fruitless.  Kara got to our house before the postcard did.  Two days after she returned home, we pulled up to the mailbox again.

“Hey, Evan, look what came today!” I said, waving the postcard around.  Kara smiled and handed it back to him.

“How do you open it?” he asked.

“It doesn’t open, Evan,” Kara said.  “It just has a picture on the front and my message to you on the back.  See?  That’s where Mommy was.  It’s called Atlanta.  Then, on the back, it says, ‘Dear Evan, I love you so much and can’t wait to see you soon!  Love, Mommy.’”

Evan flipped the postcard over a few times, then gave it one last shake to see if anything interesting would fall out.

“I don’t want the postcard because it’s not very exciting,” he announced, handing it back.

Someday, he’ll come to understand that the least exciting mail usually has the most important stuff in it.

You can return Mike Todd to sender at mikectodd@gmail.com.

How to set a Burmese wife trap

“Could you please not leave your slippers there?  I always trip over them when I’m going to the bathroom in the middle of the night,” my wife Kara said, pointing at the floor as if I was a dog who’d done a bad thing and needed to reminded again about what is acceptable behavior inside the house.  In fairness to her, it must be difficult to mentally separate me from our dog Memphis, since the pooch and I both devote what some might describe as a disproportionate level of zeal to the pastime of scratching our respective selves.

The dog and I also both hide upstairs when we get caught trying to steal the kids’ Easter candy, the bulk of which is STILL sitting on the kitchen table, taunting us.  If the apocalypse came tomorrow, our family could probably subsist through the summer on our stash of stale Peeps alone.

As I paused, considering a response, I realized that this was the beginning of the most geriatric argument Kara and I had ever taken part in.  It had everything: Nagging, slippers, nocturnal lavatory breaks.  Just thinking about that conversation, even now, makes my mouth taste of Metamucil, and I can hear a few more hairs from the periphery of my bald spot gently landing on my shoulder.

Of course, it’s unfair to characterize what Kara was doing as “nagging.”

As she explains: “It starts out as asking.  It only becomes nagging when you don’t do it.”

She’d asked many times for me to stop setting Burmese wife traps in the bathroom, but I’d had more important things to do, like Googling “how to avoid repetitive motion injuries from staring at your iPhone too much” on my iPhone.

With Kara waiting for me to respond, I peered in at our bathroom, the site of the infraction, to see just how bad it really was.  She’d actually been kind to me.  I hadn’t just left my slippers there.  It was much worse.  There, at the base of the toilet, were my slippers, facing out, with my crumpled underwear and pajama pants resting on top, an undershirt tossed nearby.  That morning, I’d jumped straight from the toilet to the shower, leaving all my worldly trappings behind.

If an archaeologist from the future had wandered into our bathroom, preserved at that moment, the only logical conclusion he could possibly have drawn is that some sort of flannel-based creature had molted right there.

“Looks like this specimen was in too much of a hurry to clean up after himself.  Probably fleeing a flannel-eating predator, like a giant moth,” he would guess.

Nine years ago, on our honeymoon, Kara and I went bungy jumping in New Zealand.  We weren’t the coolest people in the world, but we had some decent cool-person credentials.  We even used to be able to watch MTV reality shows and say, “I can understand why people would act like that.”

Since then, it’s been a long, downward spiral into complete uncoolness.  Looking at that pile of clothes in front of the toilet, I realized that I’d reached a new nadir of not being cool, and that I was likely to keep reaching new nadirs until my mid-life sports-car purchase.

I felt a deep shame, similar to the shame I felt that time I looked at my reflection in the microwave as I gnawed the melted cheese off a Mama Celeste pizza box.  If you prefer to think of yourself as more-evolved than a baboon, don’t look at your reflection when you’re licking food off of something that most people would agree is garbage.

“Sorry, babe.  I’ll try not to do that anymore,” I said.  She patted me on the head, and I knew that I’d been a good boy.

You can ask Mike Todd, then nag him when he ignores you, at mikectodd@gmail.com.

You’ve lost a friend in Pennsylvania

*** Note to reader(s): I turned in an old column again this week.  These days, I feel like I'm doing pretty good if I can keep my fingernails clipped - getting a column done is extra credit.  But that's the benefit of writing a weekly column for eight years - after a while, you can start plagiarizing yourself and nobody will notice.  The column below is from 2009.  I barely recognize it, and I wrote the thing, so hopefully it'll be like new to you, too.***

Getting my mom to join Facebook seemed like such a good idea at the time. In retrospect, it was an innovation on par with New Coke, the Hindenburg and The Matrix sequels.

“Oh, that’s for you kids. You don’t want me lurking around on Facebook, seeing what you all are up to,” she said a few weeks ago. Up to that point, Mom’s favorite social networking site had been her living room.

But my wife Kara and I insisted, thinking that Mom would enjoy using Facebook, catching up with some old friends and keeping up with current ones. So during a weekend visit to our house, while my dad and I huddled around the kitchen sink, trying to figure out the right combination of expletives and wrenches to get the new faucet installed, Kara and Mom huddled around the laptop, working on installing Mom into the world of online social networking.

Initially, the installation looked very promising. “Ooh, hey, I haven’t talked to her since high school!” Mom said, high-fiving Kara as they trolled through Facebook’s oceans of people, chumming friend requests overboard along the way. By the end of the weekend, Mom had connected with a couple dozen friends and family members. Your Facebook account isn’t fully mature until it gathers more friends than the number of people you’ve actually met in your life, but it was a good start.

The troubles began later in the week, when Mom changed her relationship status to “Married” to reflect her forty-one years of marriage to my dad.

Immediately, some family friends from my generation posted comments like: “Congratulations on finally getting him to tie the knot!” and “Hubba hubba -- who’s the new beau?”

“They’re making fun of me,” Mom said over the phone. “What did I do wrong?”

“Nothing, Mom. They were just joking around,” I said.

“Well, okay, but I don’t really understand the point of all this. Your cousin just told the whole world what he ate for breakfast,” she said.

“You don’t have to read everybody’s status updates,” I replied.

“I had Special K with fresh blueberries this morning. Do you think I should tell everyone?” she asked.

Clearly, her generation lacks the healthy narcissism of mine. Mom’s enthusiasm for Facebook gradually waned over the next few days as waves of shallow communications washed across her screen. Then a family friend uploaded a picture of Mom in which she’d been caught mid-sentence, clearly not ready for the flash to go off. It was the upload that broke the camel’s back.

“I’ve been trying for three hours to delete this photo of me,” she said, sounding exhausted. “How do I get rid of it?”

Unfortunately, pictures from your past, uploaded by your friends, are an indignity one must suffer as a Facebook user. A friend of mine from college recently uploaded pictures of me from the regrettable period several months after I’d decided to grow my hair out. Growing your hair long isn’t something you just do. It takes lots of dedication and baseball caps.

The first comment read like this: “Hey, Mike looks like a mushroom. Look out, Mike! Super Mario’s going to jump on you!”

I tried to explain to Mom that she couldn’t delete pictures that she hadn’t uploaded. The best she could do was to remove the tag that contained her name.

“Well, I don’t think Facebook was meant for my generation. I’m going to leave,” she said.

“Leave? I don’t think you can leave,” I said. “It’s like the mafia.”

Somehow, though, Mom left. I picture her dropping from the ceiling at Facebook headquarters, suspended from the small of her back by a cable like Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible.

If you’d like to issue a friend request to my mom these days, the best place to start would probably be her living room.

You can de-friend Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Notes from a padded room

Over the top of my iPhone, I sort of witnessed our three-year-old son Evan bowling into his one-year-old brother Zack, knocking him to the floor.  

“It’s okay Zack,” Evan said before anyone could yell at him, picking Zack back up to a crawling position.  Zack continued motoring along as if nothing had happened, like a turtle who’d been flipped back onto his feet.

I flicked past another few Facebook updates, looking at pictures of children begat by people I hadn’t seen in real life since high school and probably would never see again.  Somehow, at that moment, this was more interesting than looking at my own kids, who were trolling around the toy room (formerly known as the living room) looking for things to crack their heads upon.

I have the luxury of being able to half-watch our children in that room because every inch of it is covered in so much padding that you could play dodgeball with uninsured Faberge eggs in there.  We’ve also installed a baby gate that most adults can’t figure out how to operate, leading our more agile guests to decide it’s easier to hurdle their way out.

When you’re child-proofing a room, you have to think, “This coffee table looks harmless enough, but what happens when you smash your face into it?”

Because that is what your children will do, methodically going around the room, smashing their heads into things until they find something hard or sharp enough to require an emergency room visit, which is the only way to escape from the toy room.

Even if they can’t possibly hurt themselves without finding inventive ways to collide into each other, it’s really not cool to ignore your kids while you’re fiddling around on your gadget of the moment.  You need to give your kids lots of attention, because if you don’t, while you’re looking the other way, in the blink of an eye, they’ll stomp right on your crotch.  Oh, and also they grow up so fast.  But mostly the crotch-stomping thing.  Children have no regard for crotches as stomp-free zones.  When you’re on the floor with them, your crotch is just one more obstacle between them and their Hess trucks.

These days, though, it can be hard to muster the energy to get down on the floor and crawl after them.  Zack is still not sleeping through the night, and the dog has taken up snoring at the foot of our bed.  A good night’s sleep, like vacuuming and eating dinner sitting down, is something that only happens in other people’s houses.

When you have one kid, you can nap when they nap.  With two kids, you’re trapped by this terrible Venn diagram, and you can only nap in the tiny little sliver where the two circles of your kids’ naps intersect, which is when the mail truck will come and your dog will attack the windows.

I yawned and rubbed my eyes, sitting on the floor, flicking past another seven Facebook updates from acquaintances who wanted me to know how far they jogged that morning.  “Do everyone else’s friends jog this much?” I thought as Zack continued across the carpet, searching in vain for a good, hard object to knock his head against.

Just then, Evan’s face popped up over my phone.

“Daddy, Zack fell down on the floor.  I helped him up,” he said, neglecting to mention why Zack fell down.

“Wow, you sound like a hero in that story,” I said.

“Yeah,” Evan replied.

Then he disappeared again.  In a moment, he popped back up and handed me a little helmet that had fallen off one of his action figures.

“Choking hazard,” he said.  Good thing somebody’s paying attention in there.

Then, as I glanced back at the screen, Evan ran over to his wooden trains, stomping on my crotch en route.

You can multitask with Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.