Floor Mats (Don't Say I Didn't Warn You)

Truth in advertising is the reason for the title of this post. I spent today immersed in the following activities: attempting to locate a funeral home in a town in which I do not live, virtually without directions, or sense of direction, for that matter; attempting to coax an 8 year-old child to sit still for the sake of sounding shit out (reading) at 1:00 on Friday afternoon following indoor recess; attempting to be a good sport about how the only place to stop and get organic lettuce on the way home around here anymore is the Whole Foods which I swear has become even more difficult to find stuff in since the Wild Oats closed and therefore the former became my only "option"; dealing with the car mats. You can see why I chose the car mats on which to post. Lucky for you, I warned you, and so we can hope that you had the good sense to go read something else instead. In the spirit of Jonathan's recent cautionary tales about various things, I bring you Why It's Better to Go Ahead and Pay the Extra 96 Dollars So That Your Car Comes With Floor Mats in the First Place, You Cheapass.

You're probably thinking I should be careful about calling my friends cheap, but I shouldn't, because I'm the only ones among my friends who's that cheap.

So for the first 2 or 3 years I had my trusty little Civic, the carpets were protected by a bunch of pink lemonade colored carpet chunks that someone in my Belmont neighborhood left on the sidewalk one week. I was awfully proud of them, and how I'd saved 96 bucks. (I just typed Buicks by accident. I also saved those, come to think of it, or at least, saved myself of them.) But fairly quickly they became well, disgusting, and they shed EVerywhere, so at some point (I'm sure it was Meg's idea) I decided that I was probably making enough to make it OK to spring for the factory-issue floor mats. What I didn't know was that they actually require installation. I took one look at the little plastic peg set and diagram for how to take the utility knife to the expensive fabric and decided something along the lines of Maybe Some Other Time. The mats would still work, they just wouldn't so much stay in place.

So every couple of days I reach down below the driver's seat and give the floor mat a good yank to extract it from beneath the accelerator such that it doesn't cause any, I don't know, accidents. It works fine. I can even take the thing out and shake it from time to time when it starts to seem more like a beach than a floor.

But lately, with all this snow and ice and melt, it's been smelling like wet dog in my car, thanks, I figure, to the fact that the floor mat, which is a lot like a dog and is always wet, what with the virtually zero circulation situation. It's been sunny and balmy (see previous post) for days, so I had this brilliant idea yesterday. Why don't I just take it OUT of the car and give it some AIR? The driveway's not wet anymore, thanks to all this sun, so my feet won't get the carpet dirty for the rest of the day and tomorrow morning until I get the floor mat re"installed", and then it'll be fresh and dry in the cabin until it snows and melts and carries on again!

But I got cocky, and left it out overnight, and overnight was when it decided we'd had enough of dry and sunny and 50 degrees, so now the floor mat is a sopping mess slung over the deck railing and the carpet of my car is caked with the mud and dirt and pebbles that became lodged in my shoes as I got in and out of the car trying to find the funeral home, dash in and out of the school, and pick up the lettuce. Lovely.