I learned something last night: I cannot drive in New York City. Specificially, I cannot park a car in Manhattan. We had parked for the week on a street with a school, so the signs said “No Parking 8am-6pm School Days.” The kids have been on vacation all week, but this morning they returned to school so we had to repark the car last night. I agreed to do it, and I set off in the dark and rain to attempt to park the car. To summarize: it didn’t work. I was scared of the cabs that kept getting beside and in front of me, I couldn’t keep track of one-way streets, people kept wanting to walk in front of me, I couldn’t figure out where to find actual valid parking, and - worst of all - I couldn’t defog the windshield except for a tiny halo around the bottom. If I hadn’t been so frazzled by the rest of it, I would probably have figured out that the air system was actually pointing at my feet and not at the windshield at all. But everything all put together left me rather freaked out, and I had to park in front of a fire hydrant in front of C’s building and run upstairs to say “I can’t do this! Come help me!” (I’d left my cell phone with my purse, which I hadn’t brought with me.) I think that if it had been daytime I might have been okay, and if it hadn’t been raining I probably would have been fine. But that combined with the usual hazards of city driving just pushed me over the edge, so I’m not keen to try it again anytime soon. The only thing I do trust myself to do is retrieve the car and park it in front of the building for loading purposes…anything else would scare me.