Tag: doormat

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As is typical for these parts, we had our biggest snowfall of the year on March first. I don’t know what the official snowfall total will be, but just eyeballing the snow right here, I’d have to say it was about 10 inches.

If the metric is clearing snow and ice off the sidewalk, Champaign-Urbana may be the least neighborly place in the world—I’ve never seen so many sidewalks left impassible as I see in virtually any neighborhood in Champaign or Urbana, the only exceptions being campus and right downtown. But local ordinance requires apartment complexes to clear their sidewalks, and Country Fair Apartments did so, promptly and thoroughly.

Here in Winfield Village the complex clears the sidewalks as well, including right up to the door for the apartment buildings—but not for townhouses. Townhouse dwellers are supposed to clear their own walk, just from the door to the main sidewalk.

My sidewalk, shoveled
My sidewalk

My sidewalk is perhaps ten paces long and a typical width for a private walk—a bit narrower than a public sidewalk. Unless there’s a lot of snow, I can shovel it clear and put down some salt in less than ten minutes.

After 20 years in which I had no sidewalk to shovel, I have to say that so far I am enjoying my tiny bit of shoveling immensely. It makes me feel connected to my neighborhood. It also adds a whole second layer of righteously smug self-satisfaction when I become annoyed at the people who can’t be bothered to clear their sidewalks. And there’s not much I enjoy more than getting a good smug on.

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We wanted to get a doormat in advance of our Groundhog’s Day Eve party.

Because we had left it so late, I had already resigned myself to getting a merely ordinary doormat. We had good intentions of getting a good doormat later, but I knew we’d almost certainly end up using the ordinary doormat for years. It would be “good enough” and there’s always too much important stuff to do to get to less urgent tasks.

Since we weren’t even going to try to get an excellent doormat, we went to Tuesday Morning, a shop in our old neighborhood that sells mostly surplus and discontinued stuff.

We get our cocktail napkins there, because they have odd, random, cocktail napkins for cheap. Most of the cocktail napkin designs are generic birds or flowers, but we can almost always find one or two packages with something funny or interesting.

We figured they’d have odd, random doormats, and that maybe we’d be able to find one that was funny or interesting.

The first few doormats were generic birds and flowers, but then, near the bottom, was an octopus doormat!

Octopus DoormatIs it not awesome? Is it not the best doormat you’ve ever seen? I mean, yes, a doormat featuring a hedgehog and a sloth might have been even better, and one featuring a groundhog would have been more topical for our party. But honestly, even including one of those, I can’t imagine a better doormat than the one we found.

I should also mention: the party invites have gone out. If you didn’t get one, it was purely an oversight on my part. Let me know (my email address is on my contact page), and I’ll get you the details of the party.