The Tragic Saga of Lucy

Well, Lucy (my dear little Mini - and I am not really the car-naming type, but she insisted on that name) has new tires on her front wheels, finally. Backstory: I woke up to this e-mail from my dear husband one day a couple weeks ago:

Subject: Whoops...

Hey! I'm going to be back a bit late tonight... I nicked your car because A-I was running late, B-it's freaking hot today and C (most important)- so I could go to the grocery store on the way home to buy dinner. And, anyway... I brushed the curb turning around to park and I sort of blew out one of the tires a bit. So, I'll be heading to the tire store when I get out to see if I can actually buy a replacement in this town. If I'm lucky, there will be two new tires on the car when I get home. If not, there will be two new tires on the car when they can get them in to the store.

Naturally, the car place didn't have the weird Mini tires in stock, so we had to wait for them to order 'em, and then they got shipped to Rochester instead of here... Moral of the story: don't let the dear husband drive your precious car.

No, no, I kid. He couldn't do worse to her than has been done to her while just parked on our street (or in a fancy shopping center parking lot). Since I'm already on the subject, here's the list of all the crap that's happened to my poor car since I moved to Syracuse in July 2003:

• Sometime in August 2003, while looking for parking, driving down a narrow street in our neighborhood with cars parked up both sides of it, I misjudged the width of the road and sideswiped this girl's car. Ouch. Totally my fault. Knocked the passenger side mirror off Lucy and the driver's side mirror off the other car, and put a decent-sized (yet surprisingly not that noticeable) dent in my front passenger side quarter panel (I think it's called). I got the mirror fixed (after a few months driving around with it duct-taped into place), but the dented quarter panel is still not repaired (and my damn insurance went up, argh!).
  
• A few months after that, we went to Albany to see They Might Be Giants do a mini-show and book signing in this little independent bookstore which is in a pretty upscale shopping center. In between the show and getting in line for the signing, I went back out to the car to either get something or put something away - and I noticed a big, ass-shaped dent in the hood of my car. Like someone had sat down right in the middle of the hood, and the hood had buckled under their weight. WTF??? Who sits on the hood of someone else's car in a parking lot?? Grrr. So my husband knocked the dent out as best he could, but if you look closely, it still shows. The hood just looks weirdly warped. Still haven't gotten it fixed properly, because I don't have the money.
  
• Sometime last summer, while she was parked on the street right in front of our house, Lucy got tagged. Someone spray-painted a big white stripe right down her driver's side. Pretty surprising, because we don't live in that kind of neighborhood (but that kind of neighborhood isn't all that far away, either). I cried when I saw it - mostly because I thought it was going to take so much money to clean off, money I didn't (and still don't) have. But it came off just fine with some special spray-on stuff and a bit of elbow grease, except for where the paint had gotten on some plastic bits (it only partially came off those).
  
• A few weeks after that, while she was parked on the street right in front of our house, someone did a hit-and-run right into the middle of her driver's side door. I know it was a white car, because they left a good bit of their paint job behind. But there wasn't any real damage (most likely - more on that in a sec). Just a nice, ugly dent in the door. When I took her in for her regular maintenance, they cleaned it up a bit. But I still haven't had it fixed because I don't have the money.
  
• Over this past winter, some water got into the door on one of those freakish warm-ish days and then froze when the temperature dipped again. So I was driving down one of the busiest streets in town one night when all of a sudden, the windows started jerking like someone was opening the doors (the windows have no frames, so when you open the doors, the windows have to jerk down just a tiny bit), and the dome light came on. And they just kept doing it over and over again. The doors didn't actually unlatch, thank goodness. But the only way we could get it to stop was to unhook the battery. I took it in to the nearest dealer (two and a half hours away) and they said they fixed it so it would never happen again... (Yeah, I'll believe that when I see it.) But now the driver's side window makes a horrible noise when you roll it back up from being anything more than half the way down. And the more I think about it, the more I think that maybe all this driver's side window weirdness might be related to the big dent in the damn door.
  
• Oh, but we're not done yet. Just a few weeks ago, again while she was parked right out on the street in front of our house, someone hit her driver's side door again. I didn't see any addition to the dent that's there, but the shiny covering for the door handle was knocked clean off, and the mirror was knocked askew (luckily, I was able to just snap that right back into place). So, great, another thing I need to have fixed for which I, as previously mentioned, don't have the money.

So my poor, fabulous baby is actually looking kind of ghetto now, if you look closely (if you don't look too closely, she still looks just loverly). I'd love to go to a Mini owners' gathering sometime, but right now I'd just be too embarrassed.

You might be wondering why, after all this shit has happened to her while parked on the street in front of our house, we don't just park her in the driveway instead of on the street. The short answer would be because our driveway is a piece of crap. There's no way to get her in or out without scraping the bottom of the car at least once (usually twice) on a big pothole or the abrupt drop-off between the end of the driveway and the street. There's not really too much we can do about the driveway, because we're just renting, and we're probably not going to be here that much longer, anway. Oh, and what with the two other cars already in the driveway (one of which is no longer operational and needs to be towed away, as soon as my DH cleans all his crap out of it), there's really just no room.

So now you know the saga of my beautiful, abused baby car. I guess I should also note at this point that she is still young enough to be under warranty (until October), and I am still paying for her (though she'll be paid off soon - like before the end of the summer). Yet she's already had so much bad crap happen to her. She's like a crap-magnet. I am wondering if there's something I can do to de-crap-magnetize her, like burning some sage in the back seat and chanting or something. Maybe plastering the interior with milagros? I don't know. I'm just afraid that, once I do have the money to make her all spiffy again, she'll just have more assholes run into her and bash her up in different places. For all that it looks ghetto, there are some advantages to driving a car that's already had the crap kicked out of it - namely, you don't care if it gets even more banged up.

Wow. This post was supposed to be about how the DH's work had a clambake at the Drumlins country club today, and we went because, hey, free food (and it was good food, too!), and the DH won a nice SU sweatshirt in their little prize giveaway thing - a sweatshirt I had almost bought just a couple months ago. Now we are going to have to fight over who gets to wear it. And I had somehow known when I got there that that sweatshirt would be leaving with us. I don't know how, but I knew. *cue Twilight Zone theme* And I suffered from a moment of acute camera envy when I saw one of his fellow bookstore employees with a Philips keyring camera which is just about as small as my trusty Sony DSC-U50 (but which, I have since discovered through some Google research, is not nearly as fully-featured). And now we are home, settling in for an evening of Dr. Who. And blogging. We are such nerds...