One morning a couple of years ago, the Prince and I awoke, got ourselves ready for work as usual, and went outside to discover our car had been stolen in the night.

Talk about panic! At first we weren't even sure it had been stolen... it's a big parking lot, it's quite possible to forget where you parked hours earlier and spend many minutes looking around without seeing your particular vehicle even though it's sitting right over there, smirking. So of course we did spend many minutes standing in the driveway, confusedly looking around hoping to spot our vehicle in some dumb unfamiliar spot we'd forgotten about, and then spent many more minutes walking every square inch of the lot, desperately hoping that one of the other cars parked there would somehow magically transform itself into the shape of our car so we could look at one another sheepishly and then hop in and drive off to work as planned, only a few minutes behind schedule and kicking ourselves for our mutual brain farts of not being able to pick out our very own car out of a line-up.

No such luck that morning--the car was simply not there. Our last desperate measure before calling the police to report the crime was to go up to the office of the apartment manager to find out if they knew anything about it. Which is how we learned about Fly-By-Night Towing (not the real name of the company, but damn close), a towing service hired by management to patrol the lot at night and, at the towing company's own discretion, tow away cars that are parked in some manner that breaks any of a number of the anal-retentive parking rules set down by the apartment management.

Naturally, the towing service gets a fee for every car they tow, so they had plenty of incentive to look for the tiniest of infractions for which they could haul someone's car to the pokey. We were told later that we were parked with "the front left tire touching the line" of the adjacent parking space, a heinous infraction known in the bastards-who-trump-up-reasons-to-tow-your-car biz as "encroaching." We did try to argue the point, as the Prince remembered for a fact that he had checked to make sure he was in the space properly (at this point I'm not sure how or why he remembered, but at the time I know he WAS sure) but the towing place offered a very dark, blurry polaroid of a vaguely car-shaped blob sitting in a out-of-focus, roughly parking-lot-shaped area as "proof" of our infraction.

A picture that almost certainly would not have held up in small claims court, but there was no way they were letting our car out unless we crossed their palms with a bit 'o green and by then we just wanted to get the hell out of there and get to work already, so we just paid the $115 to get the car out of impound, intending to take it up with the apartment managers later. (We never did get around to it.) Even though several yeas later, we both are still obsessive about checking to make sure we are parked absolutely dead-center between the lines, everywhere we go. I wonder if we could sue them for trauma-induced OCD?

So anyway, THIS morning I awoke to the alarm clock at 5:30 a.m., reluctantly waking from the first decent, deep sleep I've had in awhile. I hit the snooze, dozed a bit, lamented my lack of time in which to laze around, dozed some more, thought about all we had to do today, remembered that I'd need to wake up the Prince so he could go meet his parents at the airport this morning, wondered if the Evil Childe had brought all the groceries and stuff in from the car late last night...

THE CAR!!!!!! Which I never moved out of the illegal space in front of our apartment building last night!!!!! Because usually, I park the car there to unload and the Prince brings in the groceries and then moves the car to a legal spot, but last night it just slipped my mind because the Prince was sleeping on the couch when I got home from the store, so I had the Evil Childe carry everything in and I got busy putting stuff away and never gave the car a second thought.

Panicked, I flew out of the bed and into coat and shoes, braless boobs flapping hither and yon under my nightshirt as I high-tailed it out into the lobby of our building, cursing my own stupidity and naturally imagining the worst... the car towed away, having to wake the Prince up and admit to his face how retarded I truly am, having to call a cab and ride over to the impound lot, having to pay the exhorbitant fee to bail our vehicle out of car jail, all while our in-laws are standing around at O'Hare fuming, feeling abandoned and wondering why there youngest son doesn't care about them any more and probably coming to the conclusion that it must have something to do with the Evil Internet PsychoHag he married and then later having to admit to THEM how retarded I truly am.

So you can imagine my complete and utter relief upon seeing my vehicle still stupidly parked right in front of the building where I had left it six hours earlier. I'm guessing the contract allowing Fly-By-Night towing to make midnight raids on our parking lot is no longer in existance, else otherwise those money-grubbing shitheels would surely have gleefully dragged it off to their lair.

Quite the anti-climax to that build-up, I know. But the jolt of adrenaline straight to my heart that shot me out of bed this morning as if from a cannon was certainly refreshing, to say the least.

I still have a lot of stuff to do. Finish putting groceries away, run the vacuum, make the bed, start a few things cooking (we're having my grandparent's special chicken goulash, with good bread for dippin' and root beer floats for dessert.) Throw in a load of laundry, including some of my good underwear, because it's just tacky to pick your butt in front of your in-laws. Maybe get a shower at some point, so I can greet everyone with wet hair and no makeup like I always wind up doing.

Shutting up and getting busy would probably be a good idea right about now.

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Last Five
Crappy job crap, weird neighbor, and someone whose baby I apparently want to have - 2006-05-08
Live from the dump - 2006-04-09
Kind of like a muzzle for your brain - 2006-03-29
...and then she fell ass-first into my cereal bowl - 2006-03-28
Playing catch-up - 2006-03-27

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