Nickels and Dimes

[captainsblog]

In no particular order:

* I was downtown today, so I took another swing at City Hall, and we wound up splitting the difference. The $35 ticket from August that I never got, which had matured to a $65 default by the time they mailed notice of it, wound up back at the original $35 fine. The hearing officer was as nitpickety as they come; if I'd been delivering a pizza, rather than process, he would have considered me to not be "parking," but since legal documents don't count as "merchandise or material" in his book, I got stuck with it.  But I also got another month to pay the lower amount, so I'm spending part of the saving on a CDification of the cassette tape of our wedding service.

* The hearing took longer than I'd paid for parking for, despite me having gotten to the head of the line much more quickly this time, and the ultimate indignity would've been if I'd been ticketed again while waiting. Not only didn't that happen, I dodged major bulletry in that regard: Buffalo now meters most of its spaces, not with coin-fed per-space stickup jobs, but with "pay stations" you buy time from and then document with a receipt on your dash. You can use plastic for them, and even better if you're moving around downtown, the time goes with you rather than going to the next guy. The wind had whipped my receipt upside-down, so either I was spared a ticket on account of someone not being able to read it, or I managed well over an hour down there without anyone coming by.  Maybe I still have some Mission From God mojo going.

* My first email of the day was from the hotel I'll be at Saturday night. I'm going a quick visit to Long Island to see some Met-blogger friends, as well as my niece Nicole, who are running in a half-marathon in my old home town. It's the anniversary of Sandy's death, and Nicole is running in her mom's honor, so we'll try to make it out to the cemetery while we're there.  I had my usual clusterfudge of dealing with hotel reservations down there, where the "host hotel" closed off their special-rate room block close to a month ago, a fact which the race organizers never bothered to mention on their site.  There were no other Marriott specials I could use (their AAA rate is actually $9 a night higher than the ridiculous rack rate), so I wound up about seven miles down the road at another Marriott property, where I'm getting a bigger room for $80 a night less.  Their missive to me at 6 a.m. said:

"Your reservation #[snip] at the Residence Inn Plainview Long Island begins soon. We're excited you'll be visiting and are preparing for your stay."

I apologized on Facebook to the other guests at that hotel (including my niece) for the brass band and strippers they're apparently ordering.

* The first presidential debate, and baseball regular-season finales, are tonight. I hope the guys from the Maryland/DC area manage to relegate the Bronx Romneys to a one-game playoff and that we'll thereafter be rid of them.

Comments

[ellettra.livejournal.com]

We have those pay stations too, and they are a vast improvement.