Attention D.C. residents: do whatever is in your power to keep your car from getting impounded. Getting it out from prison is no joke. The impound lot is at the very end of Southeast, and if your cabbie misses the hard-to-find turn, you will be on 95 forever. Then you have to wait an hour for the lot to find your vehicle, and an agonizing ten minutes for the tollbooth to scan the barcode on your receipt. All this, if it needs to be said, is the easy part -- the hard part is grappling with the DMV to process the appropriate steps to get you paid up and prepared to retrieve your car. Case in point: You will have to stand on the excrutiatingly slow line outside the cashier's office, room 1140 of 301 C St NW. As you get closer and closer to an actual cashier, you will be informed that you need to get a different set of papers -- which can be easily obtained from room 1032. By the time you return from 1032, you will have to return to the back of the 1140 line.

Really: do what it takes to ensure my fate is not your own. I have spent every day this week at the DMV and I finally have my car back. Capps took one look at all the scribbling on its windshield and remarked, "Man, she's all tatted up from prison."