Parking

There are many things that I'm going to miss when we leave Seattle, but there are a few things that I will not miss. The weather tops the "not miss," list, but a close second is awarded to parking. I am so in-tune to the parking patterns of our block that if I stay out too late (with my car), I begin to stress out about a parking spot. If I am going out for the day, I usually leave around 9:30 am and I return to pick up Genna at about 11:45. At this time, I have about a 90% chance of parking on my street, on my block. If I wait until 1:15 (when school is out), I'm down to about a 40% chance. And, the spots that are open are usually the ones that everyone else passed up because they were just a little to small, next to a bush (difficult to get out on the curb side) or in front of the weird apartment complex with the beat up sedan that looks like it had been a police car at one time. For some reason, at 5:00 pm the cars clear out and I'm guaranteed a spot less than 30 feet from our house. I can't quite figure out why the street is empty at 5:00 pm. Is everyone going out to dinner? Perhaps that is errand time? At 6:00 pm I'm down to about an 80% chance of finding a spot close to our house and the chance only goes down as the time tics on until about 10:00 pm when there's only a 5% chance... and that's just luck if someone happens to be leaving at the exact time I'm making my left-hand turn onto 18th ave, leaving me 25 seconds to speed up to the spot and put my blinker on, alerting others that the spot is mine and don't you dare take it.

When I was leaving this morning, a large pick up truck with a U-Haul trailer was parked illegally in front of our house. When got Jonah buckled in his car seat and pulled away from my parking spot, a opened up a string of four adjacent parking spots. And the driver of the pick up truck immediately started the engine. They were obviously going to move the truck & trailer and take up four spots. As I was pulling away, I was trying to see if they had a "Zone 6" sticker, if the didn't they'd have to leave in 2 hours. It just seemed so unfair that one person could take up so much parking. Fortunately, when I returned 2 hours later, truck and trailer were gone. I miss my two-car garage.

Note: I just tried to upload some photos, but that function doesn't seem to be working right now. Those poor folks at blogger.com. They've had such a bad couple of weeks.