"Reality, Part Deux" or "Put Some Windex"

Now shiny paint is nice, but there were a million things left to do. I had long since cancelled the appointment at the dealership, which was ironically (again) the part of the day I had most prepared for- checking reviews, getting directions, etc. By the time the car was waxed and the tires were filled, it was pushing noon. Time to get to the other three places I needed to go.

Vons, Vista Lock and Safe, and Kragen auto parts are all located on the same roughly 3/4- mile stretch of S. Santa Fe Road, for your convenience. I got the rug shampooer and cleaning solutions, and feeling slightly better about the day, motored over to the locksmith to see about opening the trunk. No such luck, however. The car technician who had the necessary tools was out for the weekend, which was the only time I would be in town, since I had work on Monday. But finally, I found myself in somewhat familiar territory- the auto parts store. I picked up the oil additive and Seafoam, went to the parts counter for a wireset and some super-fine E3 Diamond Fire spark plugs, and headed back to the house.

One and a half cans of engine cleaner later, I was ready to install the new parts. My brother helped during this stage by emptying what he could from the trunk via the folding middle rear seat. The trunk, not to be outdone by the rest of the car, also held a surprising array of total crap, from an old and torn-up folding campsite chair, to several glass bottles that had started on their way to be recycled and somehow never made it.

The new ignition components, coupled with almost two quarts of oil and the oil additive, immediately made a difference. Startup was suddenly smooth, and no longer sounded like each combustion cycle might be its last. Now that the Seafoam has worked its way through, the engine eagerly roars to life, even on cold starts, like an excited puppy wanting to go out for a walk.

Someone requested some pictures. While I don't have good before/after documentation, you can see some of the new ignition components here, and just imagine that the new spark plugs are out of sight underneath the arrows, since they are. Mostly, we'll have to be content with word pictures, since Lydia's the photographer in the family. Below, you can see the mystery hose, which I thought had come unattached from something, but it turns out it's a vent hose from the transmission (actually the transaxle, for those of you who are careful about these things):


Looks like the engine bay is pretty dirty, right? Wrong. It's pristine compared to how I found it. Admittedly though, it's a work in progress.
Two more to satisfy the public's curiosity:

"There are some who call me... Tim."

Some body work for later on

The car is dirty in these ones because it rained the night before, but you can still see reflections in the paint, which again, is saying something.


After the work on the engine, it was time to really clean the interior. Hoo boy. That was easily the most strenuous part of the day, but when it was over, everything looked much more inviting, and the monster stain on the passenger seat was reduced to merely a slight discoloration, which it remains to this hour. After that, I used some Tuff Stuff to clean the dash panels and most of the other surfaces, and windexed the insides of the windows.

It was really starting to come back now. The last thing I did that day was to reattach the right side mirror. All the little servo motors inside it still worked, so it still could be adjusted, it was just a matter of gluing the broken plastic back together. Once that was accomplished, my work was done for the day. After a great dinner and hanging out with the relatives who had made it into town for the occasion, I went to bed unbelievably sore and tired, but happy. It had been, as it always is in San Diego, time well spent.

********

One of the two previous owners of the car (I was the third) had installed an illegal P.A. system, and the loudspeaker was still mounted under the hood, next to the strut mount, all these years later. Perhaps this was the first owner, who smoked in it, the smell of which still lingered a bit when it came to me. At any rate, somehow I had never realized what it was until this trip. Sunday morning, as I was getting ready to leave, I cut the wires to it and threw it away as my last official act or something.

Then it was off to the Valley again, but not before we take one last look at that beautiful city...

image credit

By the time I got to the state line, the engine was running as well as it ever had, the water temperature was holding steady toward the cool side of the dial, and the Altima had a new lease on life.

Expectation vs. Reality

Expectation:

• wake up early. Vons opens at 6:00, go there and rent a rug shampooer for the car upholstery.
• some time between 8 and 10, go to Kragen to get some oil additive, Seafoam, new spark plugs, and a new wireset.
• Vista Lock and Safe opens at 10:00, go there to get the trunk lid fixed, shouldn't take very long- maybe a few minutes.
• Go to an 11:45 appointment at Mossy Nissan in Escondido, have them fix the trunk lever by the driver's seat, see if they have a replacement right side mirror hanging around.
• for the rest of the day, clean the inside of the car and the engine, install the new parts and put in the aforementioned chemicals, give it a good wash and wax

All done in time for dinner and a relaxing read before bed, right? Ah, but the best-laid plans often go awry, as the saying goes...


Reality:

It took a while to fall asleep in an unfamiliar bed, which quickly made it a bad idea to wake up as early as I had planned. But by 8 or so I was ready to work. Just one thing stood in the way of me being able to knock those first items off my to-do list: the front tires.
One was pathetically low, but workable in a pinch. The other, though, was almost flat, so the car was undriveable until this was remedied. Unfortunately, the trusty old air compressor was missing a tiny but vital part, without which no air would be going in any tires any time soon. The irony of having come 400 miles, only to be thwarted by a missing piece of metal the size of a fingernail clipping, was not lost on me.
But, a-ha, there were two more air compressors that my stepdad keeps around for things like his pressure washer and his nail gun. But after a lengthy search, he couldn't find the air hose adapter he had used not one month previous that would allow me to fill up the tires with one of them. My late start was getting even later. The clock was ticking, and my patience was running out.

Ultimately, my stepdad made the decision to go to a hardware store in Oceanside that he knew would have the part. It dawned on me that my carefully crafted schedule for the day was circling the drain, so it was time to switch tactics. I wouldn't be able to take the car anywhere for at least 45 minutes, so I decided to do some interior cleaning first, as the scripture from the previous entry directs. All the trash was removed, everything identifiable as someone's possession was set aside in a box. With the help of a new shop vac, the interior was actually a little bit recognizable again.

Then, a little bit of exterior cleaning was in order. I washed the car first, noting how the water almost seemed to soak into the paint, instead of beading up on the surface. Not a good sign. I thought it just needed a coat of wax, but the washing had revealed that the upper layers of paint on the hood, roof, and trunk had become oxidized into an opaque, filmy residue. My stepdad had come back by this point, and he got out some abrasive rubbing compound, which helped strip away the ruined paint. Luckily there was enough left underneath to look decent and to take a coat of wax. And I must say, where the paint's not chipped or scratched, it looks pretty good now.
But all this was barely the beginning.

The First Look

It was night when I got to my mom's house that Friday. My plane to San Diego was just a puddle jump from Phoenix- they didn't even get the drink cart to my row before we started descending- but it was still too late to do much work. Once I saw the car, though, and the appalling state it was in, I had to do at least a little before the next morning. It was as if I were morally bound to clean up this, dare I say, unholy mockery...

"Do ye suppose that God will look upon you as guiltless while ye sit still and behold these things? Behold I say unto you, Nay. Now I would that ye should remember that God has said that the inward vessel shall be cleansed first, and then shall the outer vessel be cleansed also."
-Alma 60:23

So I started in a little that night- mostly just making a mental appraisal of the work to be done the next day. Also, by the light of a flashlight, since there are few streetlights in Vista, (albeit for an acceptable reason) I razor-bladed most of the stickers out of the windows, dredged what trash I could reach out from under the seats and into the lower parts where your feet go, threw away a few cups and papers, and checked under the hood for anything major. The engine was caked with years worth of grime and oil deposits, but the drive belts and the more vital hoses were in surprisingly solid shape.

The next morning, work started in earnest, and it was a long day of hard labor. I had everything I was going to do planned out by the hour, and it of course all came together in precise harmony like a perfectly tuned work of automotive craftsmanship. Riiiiiiight...

Let's Bring It Back

More from Husband:

Here's a brain teaser for you... What do all of the following things have in common?

• 2 cigarette lighters
• shards of broken picture frame glass
• 2 sweaters
• a wool blanket
• an SAT prep textbook
• a thesaurus
• 4 dinosaur toys
• a broken skateboard
• tools
• some sort of action figure
  
• 3 or 4 empty coffee cups
• 2 cameras, 2 rolls of film
• $5 or so in change
• numerous CDs and jewel cases
• pens and pencils
• lots of paper trash

Yes, dear readers... all those things and more were inside the Altima when I got to my mom's house. And did I mention it was REALLY filthy. It was one of the most pathetic scenes I've ever witnessed. There's no telling how long some of the stuff had been in there, or why (broken glass? wha?)

And that wasn't all. One of the sun visors is missing, and the other is broken. The two front tires were very low. The oil was down about a quart and a half. A huge, gnarly mystery stain was on the passenger seat. On the back, the Nissan emblem and three of the letters in Altima are gone, so it just says "TIM". Which would be great, if my name were, say, Tim. There were stickers all over the inside and in the back window. Two of the wheel covers are missing, and a third is cracked. On startup, the engine sounded like it was being repeatedly punched in the gut. And then there was the paint, dirty and dull from the car being left out and never washed. (present tense has been used for things that are still on the to-do list)

And yet, somewhere underneath all that was the car that had been there since the beginning, that many years ago I had maintained with such care, and that because of a shrinking public transit network in Phoenix, and my youngest sibling going to college, would be mine again.

Let the restoration begin.

Baby, You Can Drive My Car

It's the Husband again.

Let's begin at the beginning. The story of the Altima started way back in 1999 when we bought it off of some guy's driveway in Temecula for about 7 times what it's worth today, and that's being generous. From that point on, it's a bit of a blur, except that it seems like I drove it ALL THE TIME for the next four years, and maybe the story is best told in terms of repairs.

The car is currently on its second front bumper, rear bumper, front passenger window regulator, radiator, CV boots, paint job, and front left quarter panel, its third distributor, and at least its fifth battery. The brake rotors have been resurfaced at least three times (that one's on me. I admit I drove a little crazy back then.), and the right side mirror has been glued back on three times, once with gorilla glue and twice with two-part epoxy. From experience, I recommend the epoxy.

When I was a teenager, every weekend found me in the driveway or the garage, washing and then sometimes waxing it, topping off fluids as needed, and otherwise trying to preserve that all-important mode of transportation. And of course, to a 16-year-old in California, a car is way more than that. Over there, and especially at my high school, it seemed, cars were everything. The auto shop students almost all drove classic hot rods, including an acquaintance of mine with a souped-up old Dodge Charger, and another guy who rocked a yellow Barracuda.

from here

Imagine- that was his high school car. No muffler, of course, just horsepower, huge headers, and 6 mpg. It was loud enough to wake the dead, and smelled terrible going by in the parking lot, but man, it was a thing of beauty.

But back to the story. I drove the Altima until I went to Spain, and apart from a few incidental drives on holiday trips to San Diego, it's been out of my hands ever since. At some point, which I've never been able to pin down, the neglect started. Trash started getting left in there, stains weren't cleaned, oil wasn't changed, paint was left unwashed and exposed to the sun, where it badly oxidized. And to top it all off, a key was broken off in the trunk latch. This, coupled with the fact that the lever you pull by the driver's seat to open the trunk broke 10 years ago, means that for the second time in its history, the trunk lid is stuck closed.

This was the state it was in when I found it, just over a week ago, and you won't believe some of the crazy crap that was in that car...

"Well, a lot of good cars are Japanese..."

Guest post.


This last weekend, a relic from the past was brought back to life. It's seen more adventures than many of its kind, passed through the hands of six owners, and has been a constant backdrop to the unfolding drama of life for many years. Some have called it old; some have called it an eyesore. Some have called it Lucy. But no matter what you call it, it's always...

...the Altima.

not my car, but a close approximation, courtesy of the internet

Ah yes, the memories. The time when me, Leslie, and her friend Becky who was visiting from North Carolina, stole a wooden pallet and ran it down to the beach in the back seat for a bonfire. The time when Joey ran full speed into the corner of the open passenger door and burst a blood vessel in his arm. The seminary carpools. The drag racing (kind of). The late-night toilet-papering missions. The back-and-forth trips to Orange County, to the Salt Lake airport, to shows, to Guitar Center. The attentive care, and the careless mistreatment. And now, at 161,000 miles, the restoration.

More details to follow.

Another One Bites The Dust

A guest post from Husband (Written 7/3):

In Memoriam:
The Spain-Bilbao Mission
Opened July 1, 1987; Closed June 30, 2010

I'm not sure how many of Lydia's readers belong to the LDS church, but if you do, you've either served as a missionary or know someone who has- probably lots who have. The experience is always described as an unforgettable one. Most people come back noticeably different from when they left, and in good ways. You may have noticed that they seemed more confident, more mature, maybe more serious. One thing that is common to almost everyone is the development of a deep spiritual and emotional connection with the people they worked with, and the country or area they worked in.

So it was for me. You've probably guessed that there will be a lot of God stuff in this post, so if that's not your thing, that's okay, but as with my last post, you might as well know ahead of time. I served in 7 cities in the north of Spain, and have memories of each that span the full spectrum from terrible to fantastic. I'm convinced that the coastline of the Basque Country is literally the most beautiful spot on earth. The mountains of Asturias are as majestic in their own way as the Alps. The rolling, rain-soaked hills and vineyards of Galicia seem to be a vision from another time.

Part of the reason I feel this way about those places is what is described so accurately in the Book of Mormon, which was named after a person who was named after a place that a lot of people felt that way about: "yea, the place of Mormon, the waters of Mormon, the forest of Mormon, how beautiful are they to the eyes of them who there came to the knowledge of their Redeemer..." (Mosiah 18:30) I knew the gospel before, but it had entirely new and much deeper and much more personal meaning to me by the time I came back.

As one of the sister missionaries once said, in a serious moment of one of our meetings, I sometimes wonder if the mission is maybe more for me than for anyone else. Where we were, it was an almost inescapable conclusion. Missionaries are supposed to teach, and to baptize worthy converts who have received a witness from the Holy Ghost that what they have been taught is true. But just to get someone to hint that they might be interested in hearing what we had to say- that was a big deal. Almost everyone looked at us as basically a joke, or as nice but quaint people who had little if anything of value to offer to their already complex lives.

There were many long, blue days, weeks, and sometimes months, when we wondered if we could ever find someone to teach. With very few church members and fewer referrals, we often had nothing to do but to go to the more crowded parts of town and try to talk to whoever we could get to stop. The constant walking bothered our feet and joints, which seemed to always hurt. We worked and prayed and studied so hard that we had absolute confidence that the Lord was with us- but we could get no one to listen.

Once in a while though, somebody would listen, at least at first. In rare and exceptional cases, they would open up long enough and with enough sincerity that they could receive a testimony, which would be immediately followed by a desire for baptism. There was never a greater joy than to see this happen.

In short, to quote Dickens' famous preamble: it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. We had everything before us, we had nothing before us.

The bonds that the missionaries forged as we worked together are something that is truly unique, and not found in any other relationship I've ever had. We all wanted desperately to see the church grow in Spain, and to see the fulfillment of the promises that apostles had made about our adopted country, and our mission in particular, including that it would be "one of the great success stories of the church". We were also aware, painfully at times, of the odds we faced. In 2004, ours was the lowest-baptizing mission in the Europe West Area of the church, an area that is not favored with high numbers to begin with.

Once in a large meeting, our President was so seriously worried about the future of our mission, that he asked us all to kneel and pray with him. We did, and he prayed and gave voice to what we all felt. He expressed to the Lord our bewilderment, that people could be so hard-hearted as those who were assigned to our care, and who we still loved, in spite of everything. He also told the Lord, in his Argentine Spanish, of our deep frustration: "We have desired to leave these cities that we are working in, and shake off the dust of our feet as a testimony, and never return, because of the unbelief of their inhabitants." It sounds shocking, and it was, because it was true. I'll never forget when he said that.

Nor will I ever forget the news that I happened upon purely by accident earlier this year. Just a 2-line item in the LDS Church News on February 13: "Europe Area- Combine the Spain Bilbao Mission with the Spain Barcelona, Spain Madrid and Spain Malaga missions." Combine? That sounds like they're closing it. I dug around for more information on the internet, and come to find out that yes, it was really, finally happening.

All that we had tried to do, in the end, just couldn't save it. Not even the miraculous fact, which I found out the same day, that there's now a stake of Zion in the Basque Country, as of last September. I almost get the impression that they had been waiting to be able to organize one viable stake, and that as soon as they had that foothold, they could put the mission out of its misery, it having accomplished all that could reasonably be hoped for. How different things really are from what we all thought when I was there- that a stake would be the ultimate validation, an insurance against our field of labor being wiped off the map, even if it was the poorest spot in all the vineyard.

I thought of a scripture from Isaiah that I discovered over there: "Then I said, I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nought, and in vain: yet surely my judgment is with the Lord, and my work with my God. And now, saith the Lord that formed me from the womb to be his servant, to bring Jacob again to him, Though Israel be not gathered, yet shall I be glorious in the eyes of the Lord, and my God shall be my strength."

And another, from the Doctrine and Covenants, that brought some much-needed comfort near the closing days of my time there: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, that when I give a commandment to any of the sons of men to do a work unto my name, and those sons of men go with all their might and with all they have to perform that work, and cease not their diligence, and their enemies come upon them and hinder them from performing that work, behold, it behooveth me to require that work no more at the hands of those sons of men, but to accept of their offerings... And this I make an example unto you, for your consolation concerning all those who have been commanded to do a work and have been hindered by the hands of their enemies, and by oppression, saith the Lord your God."

And so it ends, and I admit that I have allowed myself a few moments of grief at the ending of something so great, an ending that came without fanfare, without ceremony, indeed almost without attention. But I think people need to know about this. It was the best 23 years that Spain ever had.