Today has been quite a day.

Walking the puppy at 10 in the morning, I noticed our posters had been taken down by park maintenance. There was a big crew there with volunteers trimming the shrubbery and a CPC crew pumping the elm trees with some kind of pesticide. I pulled one of them over and asked who had pulled down my posters. He said it was their mandate to do that and told me he was in favor of the petition. Great way to start the day.

We had a very long talk and he shared an email he had just received from his boss admonishing him to obey the driving rules in the park. Thank you, Roger Mosier. The plan is working.

He said the crew was going to be there a couple of hours so I came back and put up the new version of the poster with annotations on the photo a little later. My technique with the wallpaper paste and brush with the posters is getting better and the remnants on the old posters make it easy to tell where to put the glue. Looks like the shelf life of the posters is about 6 days.

At 2:30 in the afternoon, I came back to ECFS and YMCA to talk to parents and caregivers and hand out the small version of the posters. Most of them already had seen the poster and signed the petition but there was a substantial number who had not. A lot of the people waiting for kids are not the parents but caregivers and I asked each of them to sign the petition and give the poster to the parent.

When presenting the petition, I've got my pitch down to the basics of the photo and how the kids are in in the photo are in a dangerous crosswalk. Today some of the kids chimed in that they agreed it was dangerous. In the morning we had just crossed 200 signatures. By the time of this writing at almost midnight, we reached 233 signatures.

Checking my email, I found a response from Kimberly Rancourt, from NY DOT. I've been trying to reach her since May 24. Here is what she wrote: 

> Hi, Jerome –
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> Sorry that I missed your call yesterday. As I mentioned last week, I am following up with folks internally on this issue. I have scheduled a meeting with my colleagues to review your concerns and will keep you posted as I find out more.
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> Best,

I have been trying for two weeks to get all the players into the conversation. Rob Cousins and Roger Mosier were easy. They were responsive and cooperative from the get-go. Kathryn Colglazer was a little more difficult but the YMCA is a much bigger organization. The NY DOT has been the absolute worst. It's great to have them in the house now, too. 

I also sent invitations to the New York Times, the New York Post, the West Side Rag, and Channel 7 to cover this story and send a reporter to the CB7 full board meeting on June 7.

Tonight's photo is a NY Parks garbage truck running the red light.