park it

I don't know where to park.

At my apartment, that is.

When I first moved home, 18 months ago, I was parking in the lot directly next to my apartment building. It seemed fine, although the spaces were oddly marked. They seemed really wide, and yet people would just pull in next to other cars, leaving enough space for the driver of that parking car to exit their vehicle, which left the rest of us confused as to what we should do. Do you park within the lines (even though some people clearly didn't follow that)? Do you follow the lead of the person who lead us all astray?

Then came the issue of visitors. If the tenants were parking in this lot, where were the visitors supposed to park? Nobody knew what to do!

So I started parking in the car-port spot next to my dad. It seemed reasonable to park there. Nobody ever took that spot; it was between where my dad parked and an old pick up truck with three missing tires (so I was given a small amount of comfort that someone wouldn't be hitting my car). The added perk of parking in the car-port was that I never needed to dust (or shovel) the snow off of my car in the winter.

After the spring arrived, I noticed that there was an abnormally large increase in the number of small birds in our car-port. I began calling them Kamikaze birds because they seemed to be fearless of everything and anything. I feared these birds, because, I kid you not, they would fly right into me if they wanted to. And sometimes I think they did.

We all know that if there's a bird around, it's going to poop. And poop they did. On my car. A lot. Turns out, there was the skeleton of a light fixture right above where I parked and the Kamikaze birds thought this was a great place to build a nest (I might have thought so too, if I was one of these birds). This pooping business was all fine and well when I had my old car because I didn't care who pooped on it. I take that back, I probably would have been really upset if a human, or a cat or a dog pooped on my car, but somehow a bird was ok, even if it was a Kamikaze bird. But now that I have my new car, I can't be having anyone or anything pooping on my car.

So I complained to my dad. And complained and complained and complained. And finally he said something to our landlord (who, by the way, looks like the father in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, with hair coming out of his nose and ears and calls my dad my "daddy). Nick, our landlord, took down the offending light fixture, and then promptly told my dad that I'm not supposed to park in the spot I was in.

The spot that I had parked in for 18 months. The spot that I parked in for 18 months and no one said boo. Apparently it belongs to someone else, someone else who hasn't needed to park in that spot for 18 months ... and countless months before that, since no one has ever parked in that spot before. Ever. In the history of River Oaks.

So after much protest. I moved. I moved to my assigned spot, J4, which is just across the car-port from where I was erroneously parking.

My new home isn't so bad. I am sandwiched between two other people, which increases the chances of my car being dinged. But the real icing on the cake is this: when I pulled in today, I noticed that another vehicle was already parked there. Actually, two vehicles were already parked there.

One was a purple Disney princess bike, complete with training wheels.

The other was a 2 foot long John Deere tractor.

And, to add insult to injury, above my new parking space is another dreaded skeletal light fixture. With a bird nest in it.

Priceless.