Park it

When you live in the city of Chicago, you get some pretty great perks. Easy public transportation, great restaurants, access to an awesome lakefront, homeless people living in your alley, rats living in your yard, you know, the best of city life. But you also get totally screwed by something called the City Sticker.

Even though you have to register your car with the state -- and pay them a nice little fee each year -- you also have to buy a sticker from the city of Chicago just to have the right to park on the street. The cost? A mere $75.

Additionally, if you live in a densely populated neighborhood, you will have zoned parking on your streets. That means you have to buy ANOTHER pass, this one for $25, so you can legally park in the zoned area. Want your friends to be able to park on your street when they visit? You're in luck! You can purchase 15 daily guest passes for the low, low price of $8.

So we ponied up $140 (that would be times two, since we have two cars registered to our address) for the privlege of parking on the city streets. And the kicker? We have a parking spot! We don't even NEED to park on the street. But they get you because if you ever leave your house and park on a street anywhere, anytime, you have to have the pass displayed. They even have some ridiculous law that lets the city check cars in parking garages to see if they have the stickers.

The fine for not having the sticker is $75, the same as buying the sticker. And you have to buy the sticker anyway, so it's like paying double. I know the amount of the fine because I have indeed been ticketed for not having a sticker in the past. Not once, but twice, in the same year. Stupid.

But the biggest ridiculousness of the whole thing is that the sticker is made so if you try to peel it off, it not only starts to disintegrate, it will not come off the windshield. Which is great when it comes to thwarting thievery of stickers, but terrible when it comes to getting the old sticker off when it's time to put the new one on. I have seen cars with seven years' worth of stickers stacked up the windshield because they're impossible to remove.

I had three stickers to get off this year on my windshield and tried like hell to peel them off with my fingers to no avail. Josh suggested Goo Gone, that miracle remover of gunk, and I added in my own idea of a razor blade.

Making sure I was in a well-ventilated area, lest the fetus get some weird birth defect from the fumes, I sprayed it on and waited a few minutes. That just means I opened the car door and called it ventilation. It said on the label to make sure you DO NOT INGEST, so because it was bolded on the directions, I made sure to follow them. All the while thinking, "Why on earth would you ever think to drink a bright orange liquid that comes in a spray bottle from Home Depot?"

I scraped the stickers off with the razor blade and it was like a miracle. Every bit of sticky came off the windshield and I was so excited I skipped into the house to tell Josh. He looked slightly horrified and said, "You didn't let it touch your skin did you? I don't think you're supposed to touch it."

Oh great. I looked down at my now chalky-looking fingertips and immediately washed them again. And again. And one more time. Awesome. I have sacrificed my fingers, and possibly the health of my unborn child, but by God, we have no more stray city stickers on our windshield. It's totally worth it.