We got the kids into the car and started heading up to Provo, but after a couple miles the car started acting funny—it dropped out of overdrive and kept trying to shift back up, but it was stuck in drive. Then it started having problems with drive and was dropping into second, and we started smelling a hot, oily smell. I suspected we were leaking transmission fluid. Brinestone wisely suggested that we pull off at the next exit, which was by the Wal-Mart in Springville.

We exited and stopped at the light to try to pull into the closest gas station. When the light turned green and I tried to go, the engine revved but the car didn’t budge. I tried shifting into park and back into drive, but nothing happened. I put on the hazard lights, popped the hood, and hopped out to take a look. (By this time our green arrow had turned red, so I wasn’t too worried about being mowed down.)

I looked under the car and saw not transmission fluid not dripping or leaking but gushing under the car—there was already a puddle of it at least two feet across. Luckily it wasn’t the transmission itself that was shot—I could see pretty clearly that it was coming from a hose to the transmission fluid cooler that had popped off. The car wasn’t going anywhere, so I decided to walk over to the gas station and get some transmission fluid and hopefully a screwdriver so I could reattach the hose, clamp it down, and get enough fluid in the transmission to allow us to get out of the intersection.

I got to the gas station and looked around, but I couldn’t see any automotive supplies or tools, which struck me as pretty ridiculous. No oil? Not even any windshield washer fluid? I headed back to the car, and as I was waiting for the crosswalk a guy ran up behind me and asked if I needed help pushing the car. He’d been behind us at the light and had pulled around us and then turned into the gas station. I said I’d love some help, and when the left turn arrow turned green again, we pushed the car through the intersection and into a parking space at the gas station. I thanked him profusely but didn’t even get his name. (Whoever you are, thanks again. You were a lifesaver.)

Brinestone suggested one of us walk down to Wal-Mart to get some transmission fluid and screwdriver to fix the hose, and I decided to go since I knew what kind of fluid to get. Oh, and did I mention that it was about 16 degrees and windy that day? I was half-frozen by the time I got to Wal-Mart, but I got what I needed and headed back to the car. I got the hose back on and clamped down (burning my arm on the exhaust manifold in the process) and started pouring in transmission fluid. Meanwhile someone from our ward saw us and checked to see if we needed any help. I told him I thought I had it under control, but he said he’d wait to see if we got it running first before he left. I checked the fluid and it looked full, so I tried putting it in gear. The car moved. Success! I thanked our neighbor, and he left.

And then I tried driving again, and nothing happened again, except this time the check engine light came on. I checked for the diagnostic codes and called my dad, who then asked a mechanic at work. Apparently the vehicle speed sensor and transmission shift control were reporting problems, but he said the former might be causing the latter and that it could have fried the speed sensor when we were revving it with no fluid in the transmission. Also, I had broken the hood release handle earlier, and now the hood was closed. I’d need a pair of pliers to pull on the end of the hood release cable and pop the hood.

We went inside the gas station to get some snacks for the kids and get warm, and I noticed that they did have a small automotive section, including transmission fluid (though it over twice what I paid at Wal-Mart), screwdrivers, and pliers. I bought a pair of pliers and decided to check the fluid again, and it looked low, but it wasn’t still leaking. It takes a while for fluid to settle in, so the full reading I got earlier wasn’t actually accurate. I kept adding fluid, waiting, and checking again until I got another full reading on the dipstick. I tried putting the car in gear again, and voila! It worked this time, and the gears didn’t drop out again like they did before. Apparently it was just low fluid causing the trouble codes.

By this point we’d spent at least an hour and a half at the gas station. Brinestone’s parents would be arriving in town in about two and a half hours, so we decided to skip the party (especially since we still didn’t really trust the car) and just head home, avoiding the freeway so we wouldn’t be left stuck in the middle of traffic on an icy, windy day. (There’s construction on the freeway right now, so there aren’t a lot of places to pull off in an emergency.)

Before we left, my dad called back and offered to give us their minivan when my mom comes up to Utah in a week or so. Apparently they were planning on buying a new van and getting rid of their old one even before I called about our problem, and they declined our offer to buy it from them. We had been planning on buying a van this summer anyway, and just a few days ago we’d talked about getting one sooner rather than later, since this car seems to be falling apart rather quickly now. So this is not just a wonderful gift but wonderful timing. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mom and Dad.

We got home safely, and when Brinestone’s family got in to town, we went out to a Chinese place for dinner. (It’s called Lucky 5, on Main Street in Spanish Fork, and I highly recommend it.) My fortune cookie read, “Your troubles will cease and fortune will smile upon you.”

It was a pretty happy end to a very crappy day.

Lego came out to help, because he’s really big into watching me work on the car. I thought I didn’t really need any help, since I had a bleeder kit, which makes it a one-man job, but I enjoy the company and figure it’s a good way to teach him stuff. He actually came in pretty handy, though, because the hose on the stupid cheapo bleeder kit kept popping off the bleeder screw and squirting brake fluid everywhere. He kept an eye on it and let me know when it popped off. But because it kept popping off, it turned into a rather slow process, and eventually I needed to break for lunch.

After lunch we went over to Macey’s, where they were holding a kids’ safety fair or some such. There were a few fire trucks, a police car, an ambulance, a life flight helicopter that sadly was gone before we got there, and a big bouncy slide thing that the kids wanted to go on again and again. We also got free snow cones and popcorn and were going to get into the line for free balloon animals, but by that time they told us they were getting ready to pack up. Lego was pretty upset that he didn’t get a balloon animal, and I told him that maybe I could buy some balloons and make something for him, since I used to know how at some point. That cheered him up a little, but it seemed he had completely forgotten about it by yesterday.

After the safety fair I went to Sears to try to find a better brake bleeder kit, since they usually have better tools, both in quality and selection, than auto parts stores like Autozone or O’Reilley. I found a kit that was actually cheaper than the one I got at O’Reilley, and it worked a lot better. I also swung by a craft store to try to find balloons for making animals, but no luck. They recommended I try a party supply store, but I didn’t have time.

I finished up with Brinestone’s car and took it for a test drive. Success! It appears that the major problem was indeed the crappy old fluid that probably had never been changed. For the record, new brake fluid is almost clear, and the old stuff that came out was a murky brown. But I noticed that the rear brakes are wearing unevenly, so I’ll have to come back to that sometime.

Sunday was pretty boring except for the part where we forgot it was stake conference until about 15 minutes before it started. We rushed out the door and managed to get there only about 10 minutes late, which was pretty remarkable, in my opinion. The parts that I managed to hear were quite good, but little children are always rather distracting, and the sound quality of the broadcast wasn’t that great in the room we were in.

Today after school I went to a party supply store and bought a pack of 20 balloons. After dinner we had family home evening, and for the activity afterwards I tried making a few animals. I had reasonably good success considering I haven’t made balloon animals in over fifteen years, but the principles are pretty simple. I think I only popped two balloons in the process, and even though the cat, lion, monkey, and dinosaur I made look kind of terrible, the kids had a blast. And so did I.

• Finished the semester with my first real 4.0 (not counting last summer when I took an intro course that I didn’t actually need and got an A).
• Replaced the front driver-side window motor and the window glass on the Beagle. The window motor was dead, and the Teagle has tinted windows, so I figured I might as well swap them all out. I’ll do the rest of the windows over the next few weeks.
• Fixed the burned-out lights in the Beagle’s dash. Hooray for having a soldering iron!
• Fixed some buggy HTML in my blog’s sidebar. Firefox and Chrome still displayed it right, but stupid Internet Explorer choked on it.
• Watched Duplo learn how to walk.

Edit: Okay, apparently I don’t actually know how to embed videos, even though I’ve done it before. I’ll try to figure it out and then update this post later.

Now here it is with the new headlight bracket attached and the bumper cover tentatively in position. The pieces are falling into place.

And finally, here it is in good-enough-to-drive form. Tada!

It’s not 100 percent finished, but the important thing is that for the first time in several weeks, it has all its headlights and indicator lights as well as the bumper and bumper cover, so it’s totally street legal now. Well, except for the missing front license plate. I guess I forgot about that. And that headlight obviously needs a little adjustment. Then I just need to put some pieces of trim back in place, and presto! Except for the hideously clashing colors, no one would ever suspect that it was wrecked.

Then I can start worrying about stripping the Teagle for other parts before I finally junk it. Alas, poor Teagle. You may have gone on to that great junkyard in the sky, but at least your donations saved another life.

Here’s the Teagle with the fender and fender liner removed.

Despite the damage to the Beagle, I didn’t really have any problem getting the fender on. And while I was at it, I took the chrome grille off of the Teagle and replaced the broken red one from the Beagle.

Oh, yeah, that looks great. The chrome almost makes up for the fact that I’ve turned my wife’s car into some sort of hideous chimera. After getting the fender and headlights back on, I mounted the bumper temporarily so that Brinestone could drive the car, then I started hacking apart the headlight and bumper brackets from the Teagle so I could replaced the bent ones on the Beagle.

It felt wrong to cut a piece of the frame off, but I figured it didn’t matter since this car would never run again anyway; it’s going to a junkyard when I’m through with it, and nobody in their right minds would buy a sixteen-year-old car with a blown head gasket and huge rusty patches on the roof so that they could fix it up and get it running again. Now I just need to attach the brackets to the Beagle by drilling holes through the brackets and the frame and then bolting them on. I was planning on doing that today, but I’m fighting a raging head cold and didn’t exactly feel up to it, so I’ll have to do that next week.

But then, luckily, I saw an ad for another ’93 Buick Regal Limited—same year, model, and trim package—with a blown head gasket. The owners decided it wasn’t worth it to fix their car, so they were selling it. I paid them $300 for it, and Mr. Anderson helped me tow it home and push it to the side of the house. It was a great find, because the body parts I need are in good condition, and there are several other parts I can salvage off it, too—a window motor, a door lock actuator, the cruise control servo, the power antenna, and a couple other miscellaneous things.

Just for kicks, I decided to document my progress on the two cars as I took them apart and put them back together. Here’s a picture of our car, the Regal Beagle (so named by Cicada), after I took off the bumper cover, which was smashed and hanging off.

Getting the rest of the bumper off was fun, because the bracket on the right side was bent backwards and I couldn’t get the nuts off. I eventually managed to wrestle the darn thing off by bending the bracket back a bit with a big metal bar I found in the garage, unbolting the left side, and prying the whole thing off.

And here it is with the right front fender and fender liner removed. The hood hinge and strut mount to the top of the fender, so I had to brace the strut against something and hope it didn’t fall on my head and kill me as I worked.

And here’s the donor car, which for obvious reasons I will call the Teagle. [Edit: Okay, Brinestone informs me that it's not so obvious. Teal + Regal Beagle = Teagle. Get it?]

Here it is after removing the entire bumper assembly and the right headlight.

Now I just need to get the fender off the Teagle and make the swap. I also need to do something about the headlight bracket on the Beagle, which is bent so badly that I’m probably not going to be able to straighten it myself. I think I’ll try to drill through the spots where it’s welded to the frame and swap the brackets. I should probably replace the bent bumper bracket, too. It’s kind of slow going, since I’m trying to work after I get home in the afternoon and before it gets too dark, and it keeps snowing on me to boot. You’ll just have to stay tuned for the next exciting installment.

Until now.

I won’t bore you all with details about replacing accumulators plugged-up service ports and leaking Schrader valves and whatnot, but I will say this: after entirely too many trips to Autozone and Wal-Mart, after three sets of service port adapters and too many cans of refrigerant, after renting $390 worth of tools (don’t worry—I got all my money back when I returned them), I was finally able to get it fixed for real.

It worked perfectly all the way home from my parents’ house, and that’s an hour drive. For the first time in two years, the AC didn’t cycle on and off every few seconds and then cut out altogether. I really knew I’d done it right when I drove past a sign that said it was 100 degrees, and I was surprised to see that it was so hot—for once, it was cool and comfortable in the car. Ahh. It’s nice to be rewarded for my efforts.

Not so. In full defiance of the forecast, it snows steadily from before the time we woke up until at least 2:00 in the afternoon. I think we got about eight or nine inches, and the temperature stayed right around freezing all day. No way I was going to go out and work in that. Of course, there probably won’t be any more warm, sunny Saturdays in quite a while, so maybe it’s time to give up and take the car to a shop instead. I really hate having to do that, but I don’t have a lot of options since my parents moved and I lost access to their garage.

We also planned to go out mattress shopping later, but we didn’t really feel up to clearing off the car and going out in that mess. The first big snow storm is always the worst, because people have had several months to forget how to drive on snow and ice (I, of course, am the exception to this rule). So instead we just sat around the house all day. We watched movies and ate Nutella on Ritz crackers. We played Scrabble. We went just a little bit stir crazy, but we managed to survive.

And I think I managed to get through the whole day without wailing in despair that the cold, dark, bleak days of winter had finally arrived.

Right after I bought it, I named it Dulcinea, not so much after the character in Don Quixote, which I haven’t read, as after one of my favorite albums, by Toad the Wet Sprocket. I never really called it Dulcinea—when I called it anything, it was usually just “The Cutlass”—but I felt like it should have a name anyway.

Dulcinea was the first decent car I owned (my previous cars being a rusty old station wagon with no A/C and a gutless old Buick Century that felt like it was going to give up the ghost at any moment), and it served me well for five years and over 40,000 miles. It was comfortable, it handled well and got decent gas mileage, and it looked pretty good considering its age, even though I was never a fan of the white exterior and red interior.

The last time I saw it, it was stranded at the parking lot of Jerry Seiner Salt Lake, unable to drive for more than five or ten minutes before stalling and refusing to restart until cooled off. I went after work on Thursday to make sure I’d gotten all our stuff out of it, including the stereo. No sense in wasting a perfectly good stereo. And then I drove home and didn’t see Dulcinea again. The tow truck came, gave Brinestone $150 for it, and that was that. It was surprisingly sad to realize that my car was gone.

Farewell, sweet Dulcinea. You were a good car whose time came too soon.

When we were about halfway there, the car suddenly stalled, even though it had apparently been running just fine. I pulled over onto the shoulder and tried to get it to start up again, but to no avail. It just cranked and cranked and never kicked over. I got out and waved at the cars driving by, but of course no one stopped. And we have no cell phone, so we couldn’t call anyone. So we got out Lego’s fold-up stroller and started walking back the other way. Luckily, someone then pulled over when we were only about fifty feet from our car.

We piled in the guy’s car (a beautiful 1955 Chevy Bel Air) and headed off. He said he needed to run a quick errand, and then he could drop us off somewhere. Meanwhile we borrowed his phone and called my brother Dave-o to ask him to pick us up. Quite serendipitously, our ride was headed to the retail store at my work, so he dropped us off there. I went to work, and Brinestone and Lego waited for my brother.

After our weekly team meeting, I got to work on my current project. It’s complicated, poorly defined, and almost certainly doomed to fail, but last I checked no one exactly gave me a say in these things. I’d been working on the darn thing for about two hours, and then poof! QuarkXPress, that most abominable pile of software, quit unexpectedly. And of course there are no program-wide settings for autosave, and I hadn’t saved it since I’d opened it, so that two hours of tedious work was lost and had to be repeated.

I really wasn’t in the mood to dive into that at the moment, so I went to chat with Cicada for a bit. That only delayed the inevitable, though, and eventually I had to get back to work. Meanwhile, Brinestone called a tow truck company and had the car towed back to our place. I figured that even if we couldn’t get it running, we could push it across the street to a little repair shop.

Lunchtime rolled around, but I had left my lunch in the car, so I headed over to the cafeteria, where I burned up a good fifteen minutes waiting in line (the registers were down). I usually just clock out for a half hour for lunch, but today I decided I needed a full hour. I’d make up the time another day. The rest of the afternoon was mostly uneventful, but it did seem to drag on far longer than it should have. And thankfully, Cicada offered to give me a ride home, so I didn’t have to bother my brother to come pick me up again.

It wasn’t the worst day ever, but it certainly wasn’t a great start to the week. And it could have been much worse—it could have all happened tomorrow, on my birthday.