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.

When the kiddies go marching home

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

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

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

“What’s the magic word?” I’d say.

“Go NOW!”

“I mean the other magic word.”

“Go FAST!”

“The other one.”

“Go, please?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dispatches from the Outer Banks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something to chirp about

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

“Shut up!” she said to nature.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wiener arithmetic from the lowest common denominator

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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