If you have ever had to do it, you know what I mean.

It’s unnatural. It’s silly looking. And it’s more impossible than solving a Rubik’s Cube blindfolded.

My dog , Lily — who must have a think-tank constantly working on new ways to get sick or injured — somehow wounded the bottom of her front paw. She then proceeded to lick and chew it until it was raw, swollen and the color of a plum.

That’s when the UPS man showed up. Now, if the Mongol Hordes come to the house, my dog will surely serve them tea. But the UPS man signals a declaration of war. Maybe she thinks he is leaving a box of cats.

He causes her to fly into a rage of ferociousness, charging the door and slamming her outstretched front paws against the frame with such force that the house shudders. This is not usually a problem … unless one of those paws is licked raw, swollen and the color of a plum.

Now you can add bleeding to the list.

My house looked like a crime scene. There was a bloody paw print on the front door, and then a little trail of blood that led back to Lily’s bed in the living room.

“Are you kidding me?!?” I shouted, cleaning up the mess and surveying the paw. “It’s just the UPS man!”

“He was delivering cats!” my sad, but proud dog seemed to say.

So she went to the vet, got an antibiotic and an order to wear a baby sock when out on walks. Oh yeah, that’s going to work. Why don’t they just ask her to do our taxes?

The incredible thing is the dog never limped or made any fuss with her infirm paw. But the minute we put a sock on her foot, she started dragging and limping and making such a pathetic scene. People walking by whispered, “Look at that HOR-rible man dragging his poor, maimed dog.”

“It’s the sock!” I wanted to scream. “She hates the sock!”

But what does it matter. By the time I looked down, she had managed to ditch the sock and was back to her happy, peppy self. On one short walk, I had to replace the sock 15 times. We were gone three weeks. Then came the coup de grace. She stopped to do her “business” and, to my stunned disbelief, below the “business” was … THE SOCK!

“NO, STUPID DOG!!!” I screamed. “NOT ON YOUR SOCK!!!”

The people walking by mumbled, “Oh, that horrible man! We should really call the ASPCA.”

We’re healing up now. Getting used to the sock, little-by-little. And her paw is no longer the color of a plum. Hooray! We’re on the road to recovery … just so long as we don’t get any UPS deliveries.

“You … um …” I stuttered. “OK, what?”

“My armadillo meeting! With Grandma Evie!”

Jeez, dad!

Don’t you remember anything. You know, Grandma Evie? Your mom? The woman who has been calling here every day for the past week because she says there’s an armadillo in her yard. Digging holes. Eating all the worms. In downtown St. Augustine. Which is more improbable than, say, green alien squirrels mining gold in the Castillo.

But there it is. The agricultural extension lady came out, looked at at the holes and said that’s what it was. Or it’s where the alien squirrel mother ship landed.

Only at Gandma Evie’s house!

“So what’s this meeting you’re having?” I asked.

Another dumb question. Eight year olds are a tough crowd.

“Seriously?!?” she said. “I’m part of the armadillo staff. I have to do research. I have to look up what armadillos eat. I have to design traps. I have a meeting tomorrow with Grandma Evie. We need to look around the neighborhood. We have to measure the holes in the yard. We have to see if there’s an armadillo under the house. We have to build a trap. That’s a lot of pressure, you know.”

“Yes, yes it is,” I said. “Did you say ‘under the house?’ Your grandmother’s not going to make you crawl under there, is she?”

“Dad, you don’t honestly think SHE’S going to do it. She’s an old lady!”

“Hmmm,” I said. “I’m not so sure about this whole armadillo thing.”

“Dad! Grandma Evie has an armadillo in her yard. It’s digging holes. It’s eating all her worms. We can’t let it do whatever it pleases. This is St. Augustine. There are rules. We have to catch it.”

“But how exactly are you going to do that?”

“That’s why I have to research it. That’s why I need to get on the Internet. That’s why I have to draw up plans. We have to dig a hole deep enough that an armadillo will fall in. But not so deep that a cat can’t get out. Little Joe will probably fall in there.”

I would believe that. Little Joe is one of my mother’s cats. He’s not the brightest. The armadillo would be in the front yard eating worms and Little Joe would be sitting at the bottom of the trap waiting for dinner.

“Alright,” I said, reluctantly. “Just be careful and don’t touch anything.”

“Don’t worry, dad. Grandma Evie said she will grab him by the tail. She has it all figured out.”

“I know,” I said. “That’s what’s worrying me.”

Update: Armadillos – 0, Little Joes – 1

Of course it was a dumb question. Dads are legendary for dumb questions. Obvious ones. And no matter how many blank stares we get. No matter how many burning laser beams we get, we keep asking them.

It was the first day of school. Second grade. The BIG time! On a whole new hall. In a big kid classroom. The seats are taller. When I sit in them, my back doesn’t creak and my knee caps don’t burst out of my legs.

We were walking up the sidewalk to school. Parents all around smiled and said, “Welcome back! Just in time, huh? One more day of summer and I was selling little Johnnie to the gypsies!” You know, good stuff like that.

“Are you excited or nervous?” I asked my daughter.

The dumb question. I got the blank stare with laser beam eyes. But an answer, too!

“Both,” she said.

“Ah, yes,” I replied. “I always felt that way, too.”

Nostalgia had prompted me to ask. I had been trying to remember what it was like as a kid to experience that first day. That cocktail of emotions when summer broke, and fall whooshed in like a wave, dragging me back to school in a tumbling froth.

What was that day like?

Hot, of course. It was Tampa. In August, kids arrived at my private Catholic school drenched in sweat. They passed out from heat exhaustion just opening the car door.

But this was a different hot. The heat of fear. Dread. Trepidation. I felt it in my head and in my feet. It tingled, and the world moved by in a blur.

What would I find? What would my class look like? Would my uniform pants still fit? Would I stutter when I said my name? Would I forget my name? If I forgot my name, would I say something utterly stupid instead? “Good morning Miss Rose. My name is … uh … TEDDY ROOSEVELT!”

Would I be the first to class? The last to class? Would all of my friends be there? There was always the chance none of them would be. It was a long summer. It was Catholic school. They were a rag-tag lot. Most were probably in prison for stealing candy bars or setting off firecrackers under police cars. What if I don’t have any friends? What if the new kids look funny? What if they SMELL funny? Remember the kid who still had accidents in his pants? What if I had to sit next to him? I can NOT sit next to him!

And this was all racing through my mind. In a single second. Thirty-thousand fear-induced questions. Like a super computer processing an endless stream of queries. None of them answerable until I took … that … first … exciting … terrible … excruciating … step … into … the … classroom.

Whoosh!

Or teachers. Remember the horror stories? I would hear them on the playground the year before. Big kids older than me told them. Terrorizing with lies because it was hot and their underwear was riding up on them. (Florida heat did strange things to children!)

“You’re going to have Miss Schwartz next year,” they would say. “She’ll remove your toenails when you get in trouble. I only have two left!”

Whoosh!

I would squeeze my toes a little tighter as I walked into class.

So many memories. New boxes of Crayons. Star Wars lunchboxes. Freshly sharpened pencils. I went to school with about 60 of them. Remember the smell of a freshly sharpened pencil? Graphite and wood shavings? Like a gerbil cage. It left a mountain of debris by the sharpener. I swept them off the back of the desk at home. My poor mother would have been crushed by an avalanche of pencil shavings if she ever pulled the desk out.

She drove a 1978 Ford Thunderbird. It was as long as a parade float. It had so much polished chrome, it blinded spy satellites when they flew over. I remember I could barely see above the door. I desperately wanted to see everything, but the big, stupid car door was like the Berlin Wall! I couldn’t see anything.

Which added to the excitement and the tension as we arrived in the frothy whoosh, and I desperately tried not to introduce myself as Teddy Roosevelt.

Lots of maps. Maps of St. Augustine. Maps of Florida. Maps of the southeast. Maps of the Civil War and of the Lewis and Clark expeditions. Maps of Kenya and the original map Columbus used on his way to the New World. It had a doodle of a sinking ship and a seagull with this note: “Hoping this wasn’t bad idea. Pickup milk on the way home.”

Frustrated when I didn’t find the air gauge, I started stuffing everything back in. Including the faded, crumpled maps. Then I paused.

I stared at them. Paper dinosaurs. I hadn’t used one in years. Did I need them? Would I ever use them again?

I never screamed anymore, “Honey, quick! Consult the map!” Long gone were those days when out would unfurl a giant ship’s sail. It would fan out like a curtain on a stage, obscuring the road. “Too much! Too much!” I would scream as she desperately tried to rein it in, and I desperately tried to see through a crack or a crease.

“Sorry,” she would cry. “It’s spring-loaded. It’s fighting me!”

You never have that problem with Google Maps and a smartphone.

Yet, I couldn’t quite bring myself to throw them away. I hesitated, almost putting them back.

Occasionally I still use a paper map. Mainly tourist ones in a new and unfamiliar city. I like how they draw big, cartoonish pictures of attractions that make them easy to find. I fold them up into tight little squares, and pull them out in a pinch when I think no one is looking. I huddle in corners, consulting the antique. I look like a spy. Or a drug pusher. Or a lunatic.

I wonder what people will think of me. “Look, a re-enactor!” a father will say to his young daughter. “He’s pretending to be a 20th century tourist following an ancient cartograph. It will lead him straight to a really bad neighborhood where his shoes and his dignity will be stolen forever.”

“I have an iPhone!” I want to scream. “I just like the unrealistic cartoon drawings, OK?!? Now where’s this museum that looks like a wedding cake?”

These days I carry those tourist maps out of habit. But I rarely consult them. My phone can lead me to a good mugging much more efficiently, and with less embarrassment. It can also tell me the weather and traffic patterns along the way.

Yet, there are times when our new technology still lets us down. When maps on papyrus or sheep’s skin inevitably save the day.

I was reminded of this while on a recent trip to North Carolina. I was reading directions to Grandfather Mountain on the Web and I got a good chuckle when I came across this: “We recommend against relying on a navigation system or other form of computer generated directions. Computers are machines that do not get car sick traveling curvy roads. Their software programs do not always recommend the quickest, simplest and most-traveled routes. They frequently default to the shortest mileage between two points (often sending drivers through remote areas over very narrow country roads). Please read through the directions listed below for the route that A REAL HUMAN BEING recommends to get from there to here.”

I loved it. And how true. Part of paper maps was we had to put some sweat equity into the endeavor. We had to be good navigators and plot a course ourselves, not just type in point A and point B. It made us explorers — part of our own destiny. I decide how to get there — even if it’s wrong! — and not a computer.

As I read the directions, it made me long for a big fold-out map with cartoon drawings. Maybe a giant cloud-covered mountain with an old timey grandpa sitting in a rocking chair smoking a corn cob pipe. That would be perfect.

But it wasn’t to be. I never thought to go out to the car and dig up a map. Instead I pulled up Google and let the machine plot me a course.

I threw away the car maps. Goodbye unfurling sail as I drive, and goodbye notes in the corner that read, “Hoping this wasn’t bad idea. Pickup milk on the way home.”

But they’re not. This is Florida. The land where citrus pasteurizes itself on the tree. It gets hot. Scald your hindquarters hot!

I remembered this running the other morning. The first hot morning. I doubled over under a shade tree three miles into my run. Sweat poured down me. People pointed and laughed and asked if I needed an ambulance. “It’s Florida! Did you forget where you live?”

Yes, yes I did.

I have to get back into the mindset. Realize the delirious, refreshing spring we’ve had is officially done, and that 90+ degree weather with 700 percent humidity is the norm. So I put together a summer primer. A “re-primer.” Something to remind me of what makes a Florida summer unique and unbearable and all our own. You know …

How jasmine that smelled so sweet just days ago will soon burst into flames. How cotton will melt while you wear it.

How ripe and atrocious a garbage dumpster gets sitting in the sun all day.

How mosquitoes can carry off medium-sized men who forgot to drench themselves in repellant. They use shrimp nets and grappling hooks.

How a run in the heat will make you hallucinate and swear you saw Elvis arguing with the Dalai Lama. Elvis sings and shakes his hips.

How the farther you run, the more high school physics classes finally make sense. Especially equations with squiggly lines that look like ripples of heat.

How everyone thinks running in the brutal Florida heat is a sign that you’re either a true Floridian, or just a drunk idiot. And because you’re a Floridian, it probably means both.

How when you come home from a run, the dog uses your sweaty legs like a salt lick. “You’re not a damn camel!” I yell at her. But it’s no use. She’s hot and needs to replenish her sodium. So I stand there while she treats me like a popsicle.

How your over-worked air conditioner in the scorching car provides no cooling relief until after you’ve gotten where you’re going. And by the time you get back in the car, it’s hot again.

How your chickens pant like a dog. And how your dog pants like a chicken.

How you can lose half your body weight in sweat while tying your shoes. How you can tell a person’s age by the sweat rings on their neck.

How the heat makes you say things that make no sense, like “tarnation.” What the heck does that mean!?! I don’t know, but I say it all the time. “Tarnation! It’s hot out!” Or “whoo-ey!” Or “blazes!” Or “It’s hot enough to peel an onion.” Or “Jiminy, it could melt cotton out here.”

How you quickly understand why pigs love a good mud puddle. And worse, how you scout your backyard for the ideal shady spot to dig your own.

How you have your AC repairman’s phone numbers tattooed on your arms.

How someone always leaves the water pitcher empty in the fridge. How there is never any ice in the trays. Or worse, the tray has just been refilled and there’s just the tiniest little crust of ice over the surface. That way when you go to break them out, frigid water dumps all down your front.

Ah, summer is here and it’s great to be a Floridian. Even if you have forgotten all the joys and sometimes life-threatening quirks that come with it. Enjoy! Those northerners with their mild summers don’t have a clue what they’re missing. Not with their light jackets and non-melting cotton.

A Leprechaun Trap! Hot diggidy dog!

It’s supposed to encourage her imagination and ability to write about a sequence of steps. But I don’t know why it kept talking about her. I GET TO BUILD A LEPRECHAUN TRAP!!! WOOHOO!

As you can see, I’m a bit excited. Oh, the possibilities.

“We could incorporate your toy that shines a rainbow onto the wall, luring the Leprechaun in by making him think there’s a pot of gold. Genius, huh?

“Uh, no,” my daughter said. “That wouldn’t work. Leprechauns know better.”

Ouch! Shot down by a 7-year-old. But I won’t be deterred. I’ll sit at the desk for a while, sketching endless ideas on dozens of sheets of paper. I’ll drink coffee until all hours of the night. I’ll try to come up with something incredible and sure to work.

“How about this: The steam turbine powers a giant industrial fan which blows the Leprechaun into this electrified titanium cage …”

Go grandiose or go home.

That was always my motto as a kid. I would get projects at school — build a birdhouse, add 2 + 2 — and then go off to my desk to come up with amazing solutions.

As a kid, there was no better homework than a project like this. It was a chance to let your mind run wild, to invent, and to dig through cabinets in the garage that hadn’t been opened in 20 years. (Often they contained hazardous materials that had been banned for causing tumors in metal.) But it was a treasure-trove for an inventor. “Asbestos and benzene-laced paint? This will work perfectly on my windmill model.”

I can’t remember how many times the hazardous materials unit had to shutdown my school, but it was a lot.

My dad taught at the local community college and always took my brother and me into the labs for stuff we could use. There was all manner of cool stuff at our disposal — a school project funhouse. Circuit boards, transistors, switches, lights, unidentified substances growing in forgotten coffee mugs. We plugged them all together and submitted them for literature projects.

I don’t think my grades were ever very good on them. For starters, inventiveness demands veering off course and going wherever your mind takes you. My teacher would say things like, “Mr. Thompson, it’s a very lovely robotic self-charging back scratcher, but the assignment was on the signing of the Declaration of Independence.”

Ooops.

And then there was the fact that my plans often called for materials that were quite expensive, or hadn’t even been invented yet. Disappointment doesn’t begin to explain the feeling of having to settle for balsa wood and modeling cement.

Sleek futuristic space ships ended up looking like ramshackle clubhouses from “The Little Rascals.”

“It’s not a hobo camp!” I would protest. “It’s a vehicle for interstellar space travel!”

Did Edison have to contend with this?!?

My daughter has her own ideas for the Leprechaun Trap. She’s gone to her own desk with her own pencil and paper to sketch out her own plans. I’m fighting the urge to look over her shoulder. To offer advice and suggest little additions to the project, like a warp drive or some kind of plutonium-powered stun gun. It’s tough to let her be. To not jump in. To just be the helper, and not the inventor. But it’s her project — her idea — and a dad’s got to know when to step back, and not step in it. (Damn that growing up!)

It’s her time to feel the excitement of inventing. And who knows? Her project might work. Might get a good grade. Might even look like a Leprechaun Trap, instead of a hobo camp. Wouldn’t that be something?

“You mean it’s not in May?!?” I said. “I thought for sure it was in May! Did they move it this year?”

“No … um … it’s kind of always in February,” she said.

“That’s awfully close to Christmas,” I told her. “Someone should look into that.”

Like a lot of men, Valentine’s Day usually becomes an afterthought. A day when some flowers are hastily arranged — “Hey, are those daisies growing on the side of the road?!?” Or a card is bought — “Hey, this one is on sale!” Or a dinner reservation is secured — “I know it’s fast food, but can you just say, ‘Table for two?’”

As kids, the holiday was mostly about writing Valentine cards for classmates. That was … well, interesting when you consider I went to an all-boys school. The boxes of pre-written cards made for awkward moments at the Academy of the Holy Names. Nothing like telling your chum how “sweet your smile is,” or that he had the “the finest hair in all the land,” or to “please be mine.” There were a lot of fistfights at recess every Valentine’s Day.

Didn’t exactly lay the right foundation for a holiday that’s supposed to be about … say … what’s it about again?

Oh, romance! And love. And kissy-smoochy things. That’s right. How easily I forget. Next week, you lug-head! Don’t forget it’s next week.

So this year I’ve endeavored to take Valentine’s Day more seriously. (Which is why I’m writing about it in my serious column! See, it’s working already.)

And I plan to take it a step further: I’m going to learn how to become a hopeless romantic. Yes, a hopeless romantic.

How will I do it? Well, the Internet, of course. That’s how the great romantic pioneers did it back in the day. They Googled it, man!

That’s what I did.

One site told me not to confuse materialism with romance. Meaning, true romantics don’t just buy gifts like 82-inch flat screen TVs made into the shape of hearts. They know that their partner wants something more meaningful and heartfelt. Something that is different and says what you really think about her. Like a key chain!

Another site said to do something out of character — something surprising and unique. That won’t be expected. I can check that one off. Simply becoming a hopeless romantic will put my wife into cardiac arrest, so “surprise” is in the bag.

Being a Prince Charming was another site’s advice. I have no idea what that means. I mean, I am pretty dashing and I often like to wear fancy getups with lots of meddles and frilly things on the shoulder pads. But there has to be more to it than that. A Prince Charming will sweep a woman off her feet. He will break into dance at the most inopportune times — “Carrying soup?!? Throw down that swill, my darling, and Waltz with me!” They say nice, romantic, flowery things. Things like, “Your eyes remind me of an autumn evening when the sun is dipping low on the horizon. Just like the days I used to spend with my high school sweetheart at the lake. She sure was swell!” Stuff like that.

Others gave super-awesome, lovey-dovey quotes to whisper in her ear. You know, romantic stuff by the great romantic pioneers of love. Like these: “I was nauseous and tingly all over. I was either in love or I had smallpox.” That was once uttered by the great romanticist Woody Allen. Or this gem from an unknown source: “Love is grand, and divorce is a hundred grand.”

Or, maybe I just keep it simple. Cook a nice meal. Make her day easy and carefree and fun. Actually talk about something she wants to talk about, instead of just staring blankly and saying, “Wait, can you say that again … pretty much from the beginning? … I was watching a squirrel out the window.”

Make her feel special and important and wanted. Make her know that meeting her was the best thing that ever happened to me. Even though I don’t always show it. Even though I take her for granted. That there isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t think I’m the luckiest man alive.

Somehow, and I haven’t figured this out yet, there has got to be a way to make her understand that things are better when she’s around. And drab and boring and empty when she isn’t. Dang, I’ve got to think of something!

At least I have until May. That’s plenty of time to get the message right. And to find some wild daisies growing on the side of the road.

It never ends well. You find yourself in some unknown territory, like cross-country, bare-handed turkey hunting.

Or in this case, writing a column about my Opinion Writing class.

What was I thinking?

Here I was assigning THEM a project — their final of the semester. On the last day I told them when it was due and ushered them out the door.

That’s when one of them asked, just loud enough for all to hear: “So, are you going to do the assignment, too?”

Am I!?! What, are you kidding? I’m the teacher. I don’t do assignments. I give them!

“You should,” someone else chimed in. Then another. It sounded grand to them.

To quiet them down (read that: shut them up) I agreed.

Rule No. 1 broken: Never make a deal with a college student.

What could I possibly write about them?

They were a funny bunch, as most college students are. Full of quirks and oddities. They ate salad for breakfast. One of them had never driven. She tried when she was 15, but her first driving experience ended in failure. She crashed into a tree.

One student said he paid better attention in class while playing a videogame on his phone. Turns out he was right, and he rattled off questions and insightful responses while his head was buried deep in a game of “Temple Run.”

Nice bunch. Strange bunch. It was never boring.

They wrote about issues that mattered to them, and in a class like that, you come to realize college students aren’t apathetic. They worry about things — heavy, important things like the economy or alcohol addiction or sexual abuse or … well … college-age apathy. They went out and did experiential writing assignments like panhandling for a day, all to get a different mindset. To step out of their comfortable box. A girl who panhandled scored a $5 bill, a spicy chicken sandwich and a new perspective on the world.

The student who had never driven wrote about giving it another shot. She took a friend’s car out in a parking lot, and I worried the whole weekend about it. Maybe I should have had them sign liability waivers, I thought. I dreaded picking up the newspaper each morning, terrified I would find a front page story about a car stuck in a tree. Would I have any comment? Yes! Always keep your feet planted firmly on the ground, kids.

The semester has ended, and my class has gone on their merry way. I’m still stuck here trying to finish my assignment — my end of the bargain.

Hopefully they learned something from me. They said they did. Of course, they probably tell all their teachers that: “Now, that Aristotle, he was a pretty good teacher and all, but I reckon he ain’t got nuthin’ on you.” (In my mind, college students always sound like Huck Finn.)

I talked to them about focusing their pieces on people, on personal stories, on making issues relate-able and compelling. I told them they have to care about what they’re writing, or else they shouldn’t write. That they need to be creative and find their voice. That they have to have a point, and most of all, a back-pocket full of confidence.

Ah, confidence! That’s the one that always gets them. It’s the one that gets us all. They dread that I make them read their pieces in class, or that I give a personal essay as an assignment. What will they write about? What in their life could be important enough to tell others?

But we all have a unique story to tell, I explain. The one who doubts it the most is also the one who has others reaching for tissues.

They’re bright, thoughtful, entertaining kids.

Along the way, I learned as much from them as they did from me. And it’s taught me that as a teacher you have to practice what you preach. Your words boomerang back on you. Your own excuses ring just as hollow as the ones they come up with.

“Would you just go do it!” I often implore myself. It sounds a lot like the voice I use in class.

Which brings me here, trying to write about them. A good class. A smart group of individuals who made a deal with their teacher. And he’s procrastinating. Trying to find a way out. Trying to avoid his own advice: That sometimes you just have to sit down, start punching keys and see where it takes you.

And reminding himself to never — EVER! — make another deal with a college student.

Why shouldn’t I be rich? I look nice in good clothes, have expensive tastes in shoes, and how else will I afford gas for my stretch Hummer?

Lucky for me I’ve finally figured out how to do it. Not by working hard. Not by playing the lottery. Not even by trying to convince Nigerian email scammers that I am an American prince who has been overthrown by his people and now needs to transfer $32 million from a seed bank in Kansas to my newly adopted home in Botswana. (That one had real potential!)

How will I do it? Easy. By spotting historical figures and celebrities in my food, then selling them online to lunatics with too much money. I’ll be awash in cash! And all for things I see on a daily basis. (Just the other day I saw Erkel on a banana peel.)

Maybe you’ve heard of the woman who just made $8,000 selling a McDonald’s chicken nugget that resembled George Washington. She kept the presidential clump of deep fried chicken in her freezer, then sold it to raise money for a youth camp in Iowa.

Personally I didn’t see Washington. I saw Grandpa from “The Munsters” or Dick Cheney before his morning coffee. Both of them could have raised her payday. But either way, there’s money to be made from food. And not by eating it. That’s so 20th century.

People pay to see this kind of stuff all the time. They go nuts for it. Elvis on a steak? Liberace in a jelly bean? Michael Jackson’s glove in a tuna salad sandwich. That’s when you know you’ve hit the big leagues.

Religious figures show up all the time. A coffee shop in Tennessee once saw Mother Theresa in a cinnamon bun. They put it in a glass case and people flocked to see it. (Even though it didn’t look like Mother Theresa. It didn’t even look like a cinnamon bun. It looked like one of those pottery creations your children make at school and you have to feign excitement when you put it on display — “Look! Little Johnny made … a diseased kidney!”

Jesus often shows up in potato chips, slices of toast, shower mold, even burned fish sticks. And great significance is always placed on these miraculous returns. As if the son of God is going to make his long-awaited return in a frozen chunk of processed fish. Now if he were singing a duet with Elvis, that’s another story.

But beside the point. It’s not whether these figures are actually in our food — their spirits looking for a way back or to send us a message: “Jesus says, ‘Eat more processed fish!’” The point is there’s money to be made, and I’m just the guy to make it. Because I see them, too. All the time.

Once I saw Gorbachev in a pancake. Even more amazing was inside the spot on his forehead you could clearly see Reagan imploring him to “tear down this wall!” That’s something, right?

Luckily a lot of these images appear when food is cooked wrong or burned. I do this all the time. And sometimes the food I cook has the same effect on people as smoking peyote. They see all kinds of things! There’s a restaurant concept in there — a place where you could stare at your food until the image of Captain Kirk or Mr. T appears. If I can just make them 3-D, I could franchise it.

A few years back a grilled cheese with the Virgin Mary singed into it sold for $28,000 on eBay. There’s gold in them there sandwiches. Imagine what I could make for Obama arm-wrestling Sarah Palin. Shouldn’t take me more than 15 or 16 tries.

I don’t know why we have this obsession with apparitions in our daily rations. But I do know we can’t get enough. That we’re searching for something more than a 99-cent nugget in that bag of fast food. Some seek messages. Others notoriety and fame. Me? I’m just looking to get rich. So if you’ll excuse me, I have some frozen waffles that need scorching. Come on Marilyn Monroe kissing Abe Lincoln!

Oh, the heck with it. I want a beer and some pretzels.

So goes my on-again, off-again training regimen for the upcoming 15K River Run in Jacksonville. Mostly it’s on-again. I’m on an overly ambitious quest to get back down to the times I was running in college. At 39, that’s no easy feat. Even more remarkably, I might just be on track. “Might” is the key word, and only if I STAY on track.

But it’s getting harder and harder the closer I get. Sleep in or go for a 9-mile run in the chilly morning air? Hmmm, which are you going to choose?

The race is next weekend, and I think I’m better off than I was last year thanks to some new techniques, a renewed focus and taking the beer and pretzels on runs with me. So I thought I would share all that I’ve learned in hopes that it might inspire you to go and burn out your knees just like me:

• The secret to running in the cold? This is a simple one to follow: Don’t do it. It’s a horrible, miserable experience. And we Floridians look especially ridiculous when the temperature drops because we don’t have proper cold weather running gear. We have to improvise. No running gloves? Wrap toilet paper around your hands. No running jacket? How about a plastic garbage bag? Bystanders see shivering, screaming people running by in what looks like trash and they think the door to the insane asylum has broken again.

• Don’t get run over by a newspaper delivery driver. That could adversely affect your time.

• Don’t discover a new kind of all-natural, organic chocolate cookie with real crème filling just two weeks into your training plan. You’d be better off adopting a drug habit or eating bricks.

• Don’t try a speed workout on a tall bridge during 30 m.p.h. gusts of wind on a day that your hair desperately needs a cut. The outcome is never good. Your hair will look like an azalea bush or a bowl of extra-fluffed popcorn. It will scare little children and make bystanders think the door to the insane asylum has broken again. I’m still trying to get it back under control with gels and hair sprays.

• Never forget your iPod before you run 9 miles on a treadmill. There are only so many times you can count the beads of sweat on the display before your mind turns to oatmeal.

• On particularly long runs when you’re tired and dreading the return home, click your heels together three times and say, “There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.” Then remind yourself you’re not Dorothy and that you don’t even have money for a cab ride.

• Know that when you’re running speed workouts, long distance and tempo runs all week, you can eat just about whatever calorie-rich food you want. Eggs benedict. Pizza for breakfast. Peanut butter and bacon sandwiches. But, again from personal experience, never do it right before your run.

• If you’re on a run and someone yells from a car, “I’ve seen stirring sticks with more meat on ‘em than you!” just wave and take it as a compliment. Don’t engage in any back-and-forth banter. Don’t belt out the first thing that comes into your head, like: “Oh yeah, well I’ve seen meat with more brain cells than you!” Because they’re right. You do look like a stirring stick. And in a fight, you will snap in half just as easily. Runners run from danger. Never to it.

• If you’re running for time, make sure you hit “start” on your watch at the beginning of your run. It will give you a much more precise reading than if you hit “start” at the end.

• And right after your race — right after all that training scores you a personal best and you feel that great sense of accomplishment — swear off running. Swear it off! Go gain 15 pounds from chocolate crème cookies and wait for next year before you pledge to do it all again.