tuesday january 12

today i came outside in the evening to find my upstairs housemate shovelling the back walk, using a shovel that he'd taken from right outside my apartment entrance. he explained that he had recently asked our landlord to supply a shovel and some salt for us this winter, and that our landlord had since let him know that they'd left a shovel out back -- he assumed this must be it.

this piece of information, along with the shovel he was holding, left me extremely confused. since i've lived here, there has always been a shovel outside my basement apartment door that i've used to clear the snow off of our walkways in the winter, but the one he was holding didn't look likethat shovel. had our landlord come and replaced that shovel with this new one? had the old shovel disappeared, leading to the landlord needing to provide this new one? was i just misremembering what that shovel looked like?

this last possibility seemed like perhaps the most plausible one, since the shovel my housemate was holding didn't exactly look like a new, state-of-the-art model. however, this explanation didn't account for why our landlord would say that the shovel situation had been fixed, if in fact it remained unchanged.

hopefully it doesn't snow much this winter and the entire issue is rendered moot.