I'm new.

I'm new and, more than that, very far away from San Francisco, for all that someone Actually There Right Now told me about SF0.

Moreover, if anyone else is in the CDNY area, I haven't figured out how to find them yet. So perhaps it's unsurprising that my very first praxis is a little on the lean side; I'm inexperienced and operating alone. Baby steps, I reassured myself, while walking around and pretending as though I was doing nothing at all unusual, while watching other people engage in incredibly suspicious behavior ... namely what appeared to be a mother-daughter team carrying a large supply of trash from a house on the street into an apartment parking lot, loading it all into a car that may or may not have belonged to a tenant of the apartments, and driving away with it.

Sadly, as it was approximately 11:30 PM at the time of this praxis, and my digital camera is ancient and eats batteries like candy (along with making really crappy pictures that I can't actually load onto my computer having long since lost the cable), I was instead using my phone's camera... which isn't all that great at night shots. Also although I've heard of the task Time And Medical Attention Heals All Wounds, it's not around anymore, and I didn't want to get shot by them. (My fiancée won't even let me flip bad drivers off anymore, on the grounds that it'll get me shot. Oh New York. Never change.)

Many years ago, when I lived in Kentucky, I came across a speed limit sign that had been suggestively altered, from its original "SPEED LIMIT 30 MPH" to a dashing "SPEED LIMIT 80 MPH". There are speed limit signs in my neighborhood that also admonish drivers to maintain the somewhat pedestrian 30 miles-per-hour limit, as well, so I considered altering one similarly. Yet ... merely mindlessly mimicking something from the past wasn't enough.

Besides, for all that this is a baby-steps sort of praxis, far better than an increase of 50 mph would be an increase of 60 mph, surely?

Behold: In the apartment parking lot, there is a sign:



And, a few minutes and some innocent walking-and-whistling later, there's an even better sign:



Bearing in mind that these pictures were, in fact, taken in the middle of the night, with a camera with no flash, I admit that I altered the files in order to make them legible. The originals are also below, in case anyone wants to come up with a better alteration.

I'm just waiting for someone to take the sign at face value. They'll probably crash into a couple of cars before they hit the apartments anyway, and might take out some of the really annoying (and, apparently, slow) children who have long since decided that an apartment's parking lot is the best place ever to play baseball.

EDIT: As of 6:47 PM the next day, the end of sunset, the sign still reads 70.

FURTHER EDIT: A day or two later, my fiancée, who is far more practiced than I at the art of improving signs, went out in full daylight to fix my mistake (based on the fact that no speed limit signs ever cross their 7s).