Hello My Dear Parking Guru,
 
I need your help desperately. My husband's car was towed on a Sunday morning along with other cars, in front of our house. We parked there on a Saturday night after 9 pm, and there were NO SIGNS on our stretch of the street. There were signs on our crossing street, for a Sunday Streets Event which we love and support, but again THERE WERE NO SIGNS OTHERWISE.
 
When we woke up at 9 am, we thought his car was stolen!

Dear Parking Guru,
 
I thought I was pretty good at finding parking spaces, but thanks to the 7x7 articles and your parking app I am excellent at finding parking, so a million thanks. However, I'm still getting parking tickets (seven so far this year) and am often not sure exactly why. I'm not really learning any lessons because the violation descriptions on the tickets are always ambiguous, and I often don't know what I've done wrong. Do you have a quick primer for me to simplify parking on a block with a lot of signs?
 
Sincerely,
Kristen

Somebody recently asked me, "So, when you were a kid, and you were playing with trucks and cars in the sandbox, were you parallel parking all of your hotwheels?"  I told her that I have memories of controlled vehicle chaos in the sandbox like other kids...but with an occasional explosion to give the Tonka ambulance and fire-truck something to do.  So upon reflection, even then, I was afflicted with the childhood version of parking anxiety, and intermittent explosive disorder.
 

I was driving down Fillmore the other day getting close to my destination for a meeting. Time was of the essence as, par for the course, I was running late.  I was simultaneously employing each of the 1001 strategies that I've written about, including asking the parking gods if I could cash in some of my good karma points for a spot right now.  And not shockingly, they delivered–one block away from my destination. I slowed down, pulled past it, and began to back into it, when suddenly, out of nowhere a man jumped and landed into the middle of the spot like a caped crusader who had just repelled down the bat-rope.