For the past two days I've been helping out my group with carrying out field measurements of methane in Santa Barbara Channel. Yesterday I drove to Santa Barbara Harbor to help them load the equipment onto the boat. Being a cheap bastard I was reluctant to pay the $1.50 for the parking lot, I decided to park on the sidewalk, which is free for the first 90 minutes as I wasn't planning on taking that long.
As usual, complications arose and the quick 1.5 hour job turned into a 4-hour session in which we had to find a way to haul a 50-foot tall aluminum tower onto a boat in the middle of a crowded marina. I returned to my car, somewhat worried, but it had not been towed or ticketed in my absence.
A sane normal person's typical reaction: Wow, I'm lucky nothing happened! I better make sure I don't do so again in the future.
My reaction: Wow, I'm lucky nothing happened! I wonder if nothing will happen if I keep doing this.
Yeah, I'm going to hell. Anyways, the next day I was running late, and so I decided to risk everything for the sake of science! I parked on the sidewalk again and ran off to the boat and international waters for the next six hours. When I returned, there was a ticket for $40 on my windshield.
I can conclude several things:
1. I'm a jerk who doesn't care about paying my dues to the city, and about the poor rich tourists who came all this way to Santa Barbara for vacation only to not be able to find parking along the beach.
2. I also need to get my priorities sorted out.
3. The parking police here are not omniscient, but they're pretty good. Or, alternatively, police in parts of the country where there is absolutely no crime usually have nothing better to do but give out parking tickets.
4. The city ended up getting more money out of me than if I had just paid for parking.
5. Santa Barbara Channel is actually pretty awesome. I saw numerous schools of fish, several herds of harbor seals (they swim right up to the side of the boat), and I think a couple of dolphins as well. Plus, there were several methane seeps, which look like a column of bubbles coming up to the surface of the ocean in the middle of an oil slick. No one I asked knows if anyone has ever tried to light up a methane plume before, though.