Prius Hilton #11: Meal Prep, Summer, Authorities
Meal Prep
I’ve started making sandwiches on Fridays at work so that I can have [decent] meals already prepped over the weekend.
My work conveniently provides a few ingredients at the salad bar — sliced tomatoes, sliced cheese, and lettuce. Everything else, I purchase at Safeway and keep in the office refrigerator.
I make 4 of these sandwiches, put them in ziploc bags, and store them inside of my ice cooler. They’ve been delicious, cheap, and convenient, would recommend.
Summer heat
Although San Francisco has a fairly moderate climate, with summer in full force, I now have to be more aware of where I park over the weekend. During the week, I head to work by 7am when it’s still pretty cool. But over the weekend, I’ll usually sleep in until 9 or 10am. Depending on the day, the cabin of the car can start to get pretty warm a little after 9, making it an uncomfortable place to sleep.
There are a couple ways I avoid this:
- The orientation of the car matters. The bedroom will get warmer noticeably faster if the sun has direct access to the main cabin through the hatch windows. If I park with the front of my car facing the rising sun, the front seat area will get warm, but the curtains will somewhat contain the heat, providing another hour or so of comfortable sleeping conditions.
- Alternatively, living in SF, finding parking next to a tall building which will provide shade in the morning is easy and works better.
- If I forget to park correctly and wake up because the side of my car is facing the sun, sometimes I’ll be too lazy to get out of bed, so I just open the windows a crack and drape my towel to provide semi-sufficient cover.
The heat isn’t bad enough for me to make any significant changes to my setup. However, if I were to move to a warmer area, or if I wanted to be able to nap comfortably during the day, I’d consider getting window panels for better sun protection and a fan to better circulate the AC into the back.
Authorities — parking meters
For the past few months, I’ve been parking in Mission Bay; it’s a nice, clean, low-crime area. The one downside is that parking is metered until 10pm, and when there events at AT&T Park, the rates are raised from 50 cents / hour to $7 / hour.
After parking there for some time, I noticed that I never saw any parking enforcement patrolling the area — maybe it’s because I’m only there late at night. I started looking at the meter statuses for other vehicles in the neighborhood and realized that a very low percentage of people were actually paying. I decided that it was probably more cost-effective to not pay and just eat the cost of the (hopefully) few and far between parking citations.
Thankfully, I didn’t have any problems for a couple of months — until one Friday night. I was brushing my teeth and watching Netflix, when I realized that a parking enforcement officer was writing me a citation! She didn’t see that I was in the car, since I was in the back seat behind heavily tinted windows. Quickly, I put my toothbrush away and got out of my car. I hadn’t prepared for this kind of situation and didn’t know what to do, so I ended up just yelling “Hey!” loudly. She was caught off guard, since she didn’t realize anyone was in the car, but she was really nice. The ticket was already in the system, but she reverted it and just ended up briefly lecturing me to pay for parking. I thanked her and drove my car around the block and found a new parking spot (and paid for the rest of the night…).
Authorities — security
Occasionally, I’ll hang out at a particular shopping center in Daly City (just south of San Francisco). I like this spot because there’s an In-N-Out (great burger joint) nearby, and the shopping center has a 24 hour Starbucks. I’ve slept there overnight a couple times since I figure that it isn’t obvious that I’m sleeping there. It has a large parking lot, and hopefully people would just assume that the owner of the car was inside the Starbucks. Well, I turned out to be wrong.
On one of these nights, I was woken up just after 1am to loud knocking and a bright flashlight shining into my car.
After a few seconds of being dazed, I realized there was a security officer talking to me, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying. I opened the side door next to me just a crack and greeted him (still in bed). He just gave me a stern look and said, “You have 10 minutes to leave”. I replied with, “Okay”.
Not wanting any further interaction with security, I climbed through the inside of the car to the drivers seat and drove off. There are a bunch of neighborhoods nearby, so I just found some street parking and went back to sleep.
In retrospect, I think the mistake I made was parking far away from any stores, since the lot is much emptier at night and lone cars are probably more suspicious. Also, after I had fallen asleep, an RV camper had parked close to me. I imagine that the security officer was likely investigating the camper, and checked my car too because of its proximity.
I’m still not against sleeping at shopping centers; I think that being smarter with where I park will be sufficient to avoid trouble. However, I’m not sure I’ll park at that specific Daly City shopping center anymore since they probably recorded my license plate.
