Commuting in NYC

This morning I drove around New York City for over an hour and a half looking for a parking spot because I had to move my truck by 8am from where it was parked. There is no parking in New York City. None. Zip. And if there is parking available, you can’t park there between 8:30am-11:00am for street sweeping. So unless I wanted to drive around for another two more hours, I needed to find parking. Well lo and behold, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is in town today. So to add to my parking difficulties, every single street is being sanctioned, and I am driving 3 mph passing through about 2,000 NYPD. There is no parking, nowhere to go, and nowhere to back up. After driving all the way to the high 70s and all the way through the low teens, I eventually find an hour meter right next to my apartment, allotting me enough time to shower and get back in my truck. I then drive to Yonkers to drop off my truck at Grandma’s, during which I ruin the alignment on my truck thanks to the many pot holes on the FDR Drive.

When Grandma takes me to the train station to go back into the city, there is no train. I find out that there was a fire on the bridge where the trains cross over a river, and all service was suspended in and out of Grand Central. Eventually a train comes, and we are one of the only trains moving. Even though I read on the MTA news “It will not be anytime soon that trains will be crossing over the bridge”, our train apparently decided to be one of the first ones over. I of course believed the fire was due to some type of terror attack, being that the Iranian President is here today, and I held my breath crossing over the bridge, preparing for the train to plunge into the river.

Well it didn’t, and we made it.

I then walked through Grand Central Station to get onto the 6 subway line home. As I walked into one of the cars on the subway, a black man dragging some type of dark plastic bag and cooler walked onto my car as well and said, “Hello everyone, I am your brother Mohammed.” Well I just about fainted. I looked to see if the doors were still open on the subway so that I could quickly run off, but they were not. I immediately thought “f#^%, I am going to die. He is going to blow up this subway, and I have no way off.”

Well, it turned out he was an established street beggar, “offering” “food” for the homeless and accepting donations.

I’m still alive. Nothing like being in the safety of your own home, where Nick and I are no longer the only tenants of our apartment, but we now also share it with a tiny, little mouse.

Home Sweet Home.