Yesterday afternoon I got a parking ticket. Where was I parked? On the street in front of our house. The ticket was for being parked on a city street for “longer than three hours.” At the time of the ticket I had been parked there for 4.5 hours.

I don’t deny that I broke the by-law (although I didn’t know it existed — I thought the only parking restriction for low-traffic suburban crescents was to not park overnight during the winter). But seriously, this was a planned cash grab and I’m mad. The reason I was parked on the street, instead of in our driveway, was that our driveway was newly paved — they paved it on Tuesday and we have to stay off of it for a few days. Everyone on our street has a new driveway so of course several of us were parked in the street all day. The cops came around and gave a parking ticket to everyone whose car was in the street yesterday afternoon.

I’ll probably just pay the ticket because it’s only $25 and it’s too much of a pain for me to haul the kids down to the courthouse during the day sometime for a hearing. But in my defense I say these things:

• We live on a new street with lots of new houses that are under construction, and the guys working on the house next door to us are parked on the street with an assortment of cars and trucks all day, every day, and yet, never a parking ticket for them;
• In anticipation of the driveway paving, we’d been parking on the street most days for the past week, and yet, the police just “happen” to come by the day after the paving, when the maximum number of people would be parked on the street with nowhere else to park;
• With two toddlers I can’t park far away and walk home, or catch a ride with someone else (as we require two car seats), and I can’t park in our neighbours’ driveways since they are all new too, so where the hell did they expect me to park?

At the moment we have pulled our cars into the empty lot next door (thank goodness for 4-wheel drive), but in theory this is tresspassing and opens us up to a whole new world of law violations. Last night there was a spontaneous gathering of our neighbours in the street and a nice couple a few houses over who dind’t get new paving (they just moved in) offered up their driveway for me to use today. But what about the rest of the street?

Man, it’s crap like this that makes mad that I have to stay stuff to my son like, “The nice policeman will help you whenever you’re in trouble.”