Day nine.
I'm certain that my backaches have been due to that crappy broken driver's seat and yesterday just about did me in, so I worked on the Volvo today. Spent a lot more time on it than I'd planned, which bothered me at first as I know that I have more than a tendency to get caught up in trivial tasks, but then I realized that I was being too hard on myself, and if I'm really gonna be relying on that thing for transportation then I needed to put some work into it.
(I went on and on about the things I did to the Volvo. You can click if you're interested)
SPOILERS! (Click to view)
And boy, did I: The driver's seat is out and has been temporarily replaced by the passenger seat. It'll stay that way until I find some way (or someone) to repair or replace it. The "new" driver's seat is slid up as close to the wheel as it'll go and it won't go any further back - the grooves that lock the seats onto the frame of the car are mirrored by design, and were never intended to be switched - but I can get used to that for now. It's a bit awkward, but at least I've got some back-support now.
I cleaned the car out, too. It was filthy. I doubt that Zach ever even so much as picked up whatever fell to the floor in there, much less ever wiped anything off. Once I saw how easy it was to take the seats out I took it straight to the do-it-yourself car wash place on San Pablo up in Berkeley. I am absolutely certain that this was the first time it'd gotten a proper washing in the last four years. It's a much lighter shade of grey-blue now, and the chrome (where it's not already pitted or ruined) is actually even a bit shiny. The washing gave me the chance to observe where water has been getting in (lots of places), so I took note of those spots and was able to repair the worst of them without too much trouble.
I went through the whole car, boot to bonnet, and threw out all of the crap that a vacuum would choke on, and I found a whole bunch of important little car parts in the process. They were just lying about everywhere! Some on the floor, others embedded in gunk in the trunk, one in the glove box I was able to repair the passenger side seatbelt with a spring that I found in the ashtray, so that works now, and I finally took a razor blade to those stupid stickers in the back windows. I cleaned all of the windows, in fact, and it made a massive difference. I took everything out of the trunk except the spare tire, which had been sliding back and forth in the trunk and thumping loudly against the sides of the car whenever I made a turn or a sudden stop. Found all of the hardware to lock the spare down, too. It's currently soaking in some CLR on my back balcony. Hopefully I can still use it. If so, that's one less part I'll need to source.
I fixed the left rear window, too. Whoever the idiot who'd wrenched the latch straight out from the frame of the car was, I curse them. It took me a few sprays of WD40 and about five minutes of working it open and closed to get it back in useable form, and that window closes now.
After vacuuming the whole thing out, pressure-spraying the floor mats and trunk lining (it's removable!), razor-blading and Windexing all of the windows, and wiping the whole thing out, it almost kinda looks nice. I even found a crappy little battery-operated iPod speaker set in the glove box, so cleaned the corrosion out of it and popped in new batteries and now I've got tunes!
Oh yeah, I discovered one other important detail. Zach was wrong - the oil light wasn't faulty, it was on because it needed oil. Imagine that. Runs a lot more quietly now, though I shudder to think at how long he'd let it go like that. (Okay, now I sound like a car freak. I swear I'm not. I also swore that I wouldn't make a project of fixing that thing up, though but it's just so pretty.) The car wash was the last Volvo-related thing I did and I left there hungry like woah, so I went straight to that little Everett & Jones shack near University Avenue & had a dinner of smoked pork ribs (nom) & potato salad.
Then I went to SuperLong's (screw you, CVS - I will never call it anything else) to pick up the little half-pint mason jars I'd need in order to split up the teas that Traci & I bought together at Kalustyan's in NYC, and my night took a turn for the worse. I didn't know that I had so many associations with her and that place. Parking the car, all I could see was us dashing to steal another few bags of soil from the outdoor (and totally unattended) gardening area. The plants we'd bought there together. The garden we shopped so carefully together for last year in July at one in the morning. The far back corner of the store where I found the last Clapper in stock in the east bay as a joke birthday present for her last February. The long aisles of pots for plants and the rack near the bathrooms full of socks with funny designs on them and the candy aisle where she'd reach out and grab something sweet that she liked and toss it in the cart with that face that said, "What? Nothing just happened" and her eyes when she gets like that and goddamnit it was suddenly so much harder to breathe in the aching fucking vacuum of her absence and so I found my items as quickly as I could because I couldn't wait to get the fuck out of there.
That was at 7pm. I've been quiet ever since. I don't know, sometimes, whether I'm doing really well with all of this or if I'm just not allowing myself to feel sad about it all, and maybe those two things are one in the same, but tonight was long and quiet and lonely and I went through the rest of my day's list and finished it up because I didn't know what the hell else to do.
I did a lot more once I got home, but I don't feel like writing about it now. Besides, it's late. I hadn't expected to write for as long as I did tonight.
***
I miss you so fucking much right now.
Goodnight.
