This guy materialized in front of me while sitting in my car last week. He’s a little shy and gets nervous when people look him in the eye, which is why he has all those decoy eyes . . . to throw you off. He doesn’t have a name yet but I think maybe he would not be as freaked out by you if you gave him one. Not Mr. Bubbles though . . . that just isn’t his style.

“Why were you drawing in your car last week?” you ask . . . well here is that story. A couple weeks ago I drove up to NYC for a change of scenery and to visit my sister and some friends. I could probably have taken the Bolt Bus up as I do quite often, but for a number of reasons I decided to drive instead. Although driving has it’s advantages, there is also the (necessary) annoyance of biweekly alternate side street cleaning (although I really think weekly would be fine). On my sister’s street I can either move my car every Monday/Thursday or every Tuesday/Friday depending on the side of the street. I opted for the Tuesday/Friday special. On each of those days during my visit I would go down to my car at 11am, sit with my windows open and wait until the street cleaners came through, at which point I would drive around and come back to roughly the same spot and then continue to sit until 12:30pm. Cops would come and go, but as long as I was sitting in my car I would not get a ticket. At first I dreaded these 1.5 hour disturbances in my day, but then I came to embrace them as forced moments away from my computer (I did try to bring my lappy 486 into the car and get wifi, but had no luck). Sometimes I would knit, sometimes I would draw and sometimes I would try to get some non-internet work done on my laptop. My friend above was one of these creations that kept me company.

The funny thing about all this is that I am not the only one doing the biweekly car rotations. There are loads of people all over NYC taking their lunch breaks in their cars twice a week while the cleaners clean their streets. What blows my mind is that most of them just sit and do nothing for those 1.5 hours. Please excuse the very brief and poor quality video I took with my cellular device, but you can kind of see the silliness of the situation. Cars sit on the street, then the cleaner comes up behind them and they basically just drive around in a circle and pull right back into their spots. I had to cut the video short because it was my turn to turn like the rest but I think you get the idea. I would really love to get an aerial video of the whole thing but that might have to wait.