little blog on the prairie

From the Daily Illini Police Blotter:

“A 54-year-old woman was issued a notice to appear in court after allegedly stealing a bicycle belonging to a 7-year-old boy at the 900 block of West Maple Street, Sunday.”

Did she take his ice cream too?

Some of you may have noticed the new booth at Market at the Square selling Greek food under the name Papageorge. I stopped to talk with them the other day, because I had heard rumblings about a new Greek restaurant coming to town. It turns out they are the folks behind the restaurant, which will be opening (they claim) on July 1.

Of course, the next logical question would be where. This is where the interesting part comes in … evidently, they have been told by their lawyers not to reveal the location “because it is going into an existing business, and the owner there hasn’t told his employees.” (They will reveal the location on June 30.) OK, that just makes me more curious … and also makes me feel for those employees, who will be presumably abandoned without warning.

I would hazard a guess as to where this might be happening, but decided that would be in poor taste because of the all the people who may be affected by this. Still, it makes you wonder.

(Off topic but speaking of the Market at the Square … what’s up with the explosion in tie dye vendors?!?!)

If there’s an open house in my neighborhood, I’m usually there to check it out. I want to see what people think their houses are worth, and what I think it’s worth. I also want to compare their house, inevitably, to mine. So now that the summer housing market is heating up, I can’t help but look up what the house around the corner is going for, just one day after the for sale sign went up on the lawn.

There’s a neat tool that one of my friends told me about, and although it’s totally on the up and up, I sometimes feel a tad guilty when I use it. It’s on the Champaign County website, under the county assessment office. There, you can find out what any person in Champaign County paid for their house. You can look it up by address or by taxpayer name. It’s fun to see what local celebrities paid for their McMansions. For instance, University of Illinois football coach Ron Zook — who recently sang “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” at Wrigley Field while reading the words from a card — paid a little more than $900,000 for his home in tony Southwest Champaign.

While it feels kind of funny to look this stuff up, it’s all public record. And it can be very useful when you are looking to buy or sell a property, especially if you decide to forgo contracting a realtor.

Every time my parents come down to C-U, there is inevitably a comment or two about the copious amount of orange dye around our fair city. When my mother-in-law stayed with us after Peanut was born, she pointed out to me that even the fire hydrants around here are orange. I was reminded of this this morning when I saw a person, presumably a City of Urbana employee, repainting an orange fire hydrant on University Avenue. (Upon further investigation, I discovered that there may be some rhyme and reason to fire hydrant colors …).

Mr. lbotp and I go to the same dentist. I had the good fortune of paying him a visit recently for a standard cleaning. After opening my brand new “free” toothbrush, I realized that our bathroom looked like an advertisement for a certain local Big Ten University’s athletic teams. Yes, my new tooth brush is blue, and Mr. lbotp’s toothbrush is orange. And not just any old shade of orange and blue. Somehow, I don’t think this is a coincidence.

Jenna over at A Mom For All Seasons posted last week about local places to get the official treat of summer, ice cream (or in our case, custard). This got me thinking once again about a topic that was raised by a friend who is a C-U newbie: Where the heck can you get some decent frozen yogurt in this town?

This was a mind-altering question for me. I racked my brain to think of a good place for froyo (ie not Baskin Robbins), and since the demise of Delights at the Illini Union, I couldn’t think of one. I haven’t been to the Za’s on campus for awhile, so I’m not sure if Delights just moved in over there (I’m sure a reader could confirm this for me) but Delight’s isn’t really what I think of when I think of a fro-yo shop. Maybe I am stuck back in the days of TCBY. But as the New York Times proclaimed in February, frozen yogurt is back. In the land of fruits and nuts (California), trendy chain Pinkberry is all the rage. (Up north in my hometown, froyo never left. The same mom-n-pop shop has been selling the stuff since yours truly was in grade school.)

I don’t need something along the lines of Pinkberry, but I don’t need the calories of a Cold Stone or a Culver’s. Makes me long for the TCBY days. Call me crazy.

Now that Memorial Day has past and June is upon us, it’s time for our summer to-do list. This includes activities that I’ve always wanted to do but never have had the opportunity, or stuff I’ve waited to do until I had more time. Ellen has her life lists, and that’s a little too daunting for me … I need something to digest in smaller chunks!

Here’s a list, in stream-of-consciousness order:

• pick berries at Pontious Farm
• go hunting for treasures at the Third Sunday Market
• get treats at small town ice cream shops, like the Sidney Dairy Barn
• catch a flick at the Harvest Moon Drive-In in Gibson City
• go paddling down the Middle Fork River
• rent a paddle boat at Crystal Lake
• plan a Sunday brunch tour of Escobar’s, Cafe Luna and wherever else we can find it
• attend a Danville Dans game and root, root, root for the home team
• take in a show at the Little Theater on the Square
  
• Watch the donkey races at the Fisher Fair