Woes of the Snows
Dec. 28th, 2014 03:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lydyWe didn't really get that much snow in South Minneapolis. However, TPTB declared a snow emergency, for reasons best known to themselves. And so I am woe.
Look, I do sympathize with the snow emergency system. In the normal course of events, we get a fuckton of snow over the course of the season. Roads become...entertaining. Something Must Be Done. St. Paul experimented one year with waiting until it melted. This experiment was not well received, and the mayor was voted out of office. Some suburbs simply don't allow on-street parking, which is great if you have a garage, but not so good if you don't. No one with even a tenuous grasp on reality thinks that all the cars in Minneapolis have garages to park in, so the system here involves a three-pronged attack. First they plow the snow emergency routes, then the even side of the other streets, then the odd side of the other streets. It is probably not the best system in the universe, but it does get the streets reasonably well plowed. Being in the way of the snow plows costs upwards of $200 if they decide to tag and tow.
So, onward to my tale of woe.
We live on a snow emergency route. That means that from 9:00 p.m. until 8:00 a.m., there is no parking day one of the emergency. There's a caveat that if the street is fully plowed, you can then park there even if it's before the time. So, I'm sitting around at two-thirty in the morning, about to fall over. I know that my car is parked on the south side of a non-snow emergency route, as is my sweetie David's. I look at the app on my phone to check on the status of the snow emergency, and it seems to suggest that the south side of the street is, in fact, the even side of the street, not the odd side. Quelle horreur. (However that's spelled.) It being practically three in the mother fucking morning, no way am I going to be up at eight a.m., and I assume that the street outside our house has been fully plowed. So, I gather many car keys, and move, first David's car, and then my own. In the process of doing so, I determine that the app was misleading, and that the cars were, in fact, parked on the odd side of the street, which is to say, if I hadn't moved them, they would have been fine come eight a.m. when the next round of plowing occurs. Sigh.
I did mention that we didn't get much snow, didn't I? When I get out my my car, I notice that, you know, it doesn't really look like the plows have made it all the way to the curb. I mean, the center of the street has been plowed, but there's still a couple of inches of accumulation in the parking lane. There's just not a lot of snow, so little that in the normal course of things Minneapolis often doesn't even bother plowing. I go inside. It's fucking cold (11 degrees fondly Fahrenheit) and try to talk myself into believing that they won't really tow our cars. I fail to convince myself. Roughly $500 of towing fees is remarkably conducive to doubt.
So, out I trek, into the cold, and move the cars again, back to where they were.
Woe is me.
Look, I do sympathize with the snow emergency system. In the normal course of events, we get a fuckton of snow over the course of the season. Roads become...entertaining. Something Must Be Done. St. Paul experimented one year with waiting until it melted. This experiment was not well received, and the mayor was voted out of office. Some suburbs simply don't allow on-street parking, which is great if you have a garage, but not so good if you don't. No one with even a tenuous grasp on reality thinks that all the cars in Minneapolis have garages to park in, so the system here involves a three-pronged attack. First they plow the snow emergency routes, then the even side of the other streets, then the odd side of the other streets. It is probably not the best system in the universe, but it does get the streets reasonably well plowed. Being in the way of the snow plows costs upwards of $200 if they decide to tag and tow.
So, onward to my tale of woe.
We live on a snow emergency route. That means that from 9:00 p.m. until 8:00 a.m., there is no parking day one of the emergency. There's a caveat that if the street is fully plowed, you can then park there even if it's before the time. So, I'm sitting around at two-thirty in the morning, about to fall over. I know that my car is parked on the south side of a non-snow emergency route, as is my sweetie David's. I look at the app on my phone to check on the status of the snow emergency, and it seems to suggest that the south side of the street is, in fact, the even side of the street, not the odd side. Quelle horreur. (However that's spelled.) It being practically three in the mother fucking morning, no way am I going to be up at eight a.m., and I assume that the street outside our house has been fully plowed. So, I gather many car keys, and move, first David's car, and then my own. In the process of doing so, I determine that the app was misleading, and that the cars were, in fact, parked on the odd side of the street, which is to say, if I hadn't moved them, they would have been fine come eight a.m. when the next round of plowing occurs. Sigh.
I did mention that we didn't get much snow, didn't I? When I get out my my car, I notice that, you know, it doesn't really look like the plows have made it all the way to the curb. I mean, the center of the street has been plowed, but there's still a couple of inches of accumulation in the parking lane. There's just not a lot of snow, so little that in the normal course of things Minneapolis often doesn't even bother plowing. I go inside. It's fucking cold (11 degrees fondly Fahrenheit) and try to talk myself into believing that they won't really tow our cars. I fail to convince myself. Roughly $500 of towing fees is remarkably conducive to doubt.
So, out I trek, into the cold, and move the cars again, back to where they were.
Woe is me.
