My entire day was eaten by one small task that got way the hell out of hand.
It began when I was doing dishes and noticed that, as per usual, my husband had a stack of travel coffee mugs lined up beside the sink. It should surprise no one to learn that he has quite an assortment of them.
I stared down at them and said to myself, “Self, I happen to know for a fact that he has left at least two more of those things floating around in my car someplace. I’ll just run downstairs and get them, and wash them all at once.”
So I went downstairs, extricated the travel mugs, and while I was down there I was disgusted by my car’s interior. It was littered with fast food and candy/energy bar wrappings, as well as broken CD cases, stray socks, Jurassic Slim Jims from road trips past, and melted Chap-Stick tubes.
I took the mugs back upstairs as intended, and decided I couldn’t just leave my car like that.
That’s why I grabbed a trash bag and went back downstairs. I got most of the junk out of the car’s interior and then, on a lark, I took a peek in the trunk. It was stuffed with more trash (hastily thrown there in order to clear the interior for passengers), some hopelessly dirty rags (and some clean ones), and more miscellaneous junk than you could shake a stick at.* I filled my trash bag and chucked it into the nearest dumpster. And then I realized that there were plenty of non-trash items still lurking in the car, and I didn’t want to throw them away but I didn’t want to drive around with them anymore either.
Back upstairs I went, and I got a tote to hold the sweater, the scarves, the CDs that were intact, and some pens. They were dusty. And sort of gross. I chucked the clothing items into the laundry and then felt compelled to reach for the Windex and a roll of paper towels.
I mean, you know. While I was at it.
So I removed all the nasty goop that had worked its way into the cracks and coated my dashboard, as well as the door handles and the gearshift. This operation took the better part of 45 minutes and half my brand new roll of paper towels. But oh, how nice it looked in there when I was done!
Except for, well … all the broken glass on the floorboards (from when the car was broken into a year or two ago), all the dirt, all the grass, all the leaves, and that nasty-ass stain on the back left floor mat where I spilled laundry detergent back when I lived in Tennessee and regularly drove to a laundromat.
Ew. Hmm. I knew of several vacuums at several gas stations, but if I was going to plunk down a fistful of quarters I might as well give the exterior a good rinse too. Hell, I hadn’t washed that poor car since I’d moved here. The time had surely arrived.
But I didn’t want to run the car through a machine wash because my driver’s side exterior mirror is held together with clear packing tape (shut up. don’t laugh.); and, the longer I gazed upon my car’s exterior, the more embarrassed I was about the prospect of taking it to a place where real life people would wash it for me by hand. Yes, ladies and gentlemen. My car was too filthy to take to a car wash.
I needed a wand, and maybe a long-handled brush with hot soapy foam, and a stall where I could scrub away my shame. And the only one I knew for absolute certain was several miles away, on the other side of downtown near Ballard — the Brown Bear car wash on 15th, right before the Ballard bridge. But did I want to make that drive?
It was too late. I was too deep in my car-maintenance trap to refuse.
I grabbed my purse and all the quarters that were left in my laundry fund (about six bucks) and hit the road. Twenty minutes later I’d found the spot and I commenced vacuuming the hell out of my interior — probably sucking up a tall mocha’s worth of pennies and nickels, as well as one moth-eaten glove without a match. Then I moved on to the stall.
I was down to about three dollars in quarters. This was a “Wash your car for two dollars!” scam, and I say “scam” because if you can soap a car, scrub it down, rinse it off, and be out of the stall in four minutes then you are a superperson and I just don’t want to hear about it. I especially don’t want to hear about it when my poor little used-to-be-white Sentra has spent 2-1/2 years being parked on Seattle city streets underneath trees that shed strange sticky things that embed themselves in the paint job.
I ran out of quarters. But I had a ten dollar bill and I cashed that bad-boy in for more coins than could comfortably fit in my pockets. I used almost all of them, though I could’ve still hypothetically sprung for the “floor mat shampoo” station a few yards away. In the end, I was too tired, too wet, and too cold. I was also thoroughly lacquered with “final rinse/clear protective coating,” courtesy of Puget Sound’s ocean air backdraft.
Besides. I know that the gruesome-looking backseat stain that looks like liquid mold and Starbucks is really just plain old Tide. Passengers can deal with it.
The end result is not flawless, but it’s quite satisfactory. My car still bears the scars of too-narrow parking spaces and aggressive drivers, the scrapes of God-knows-what and the smudges of nobody-remembers -how-that- got-there. But it’s mostly white again, and the interior looks more like a civilized North American land-ape drives it, and less like carbonated beverage-flinging is mandatory.
I topped off the afternoon with a full tank of gas and a Coke-flavored Slurpee in a plastic 3D Incredible Hulk cup. And yes, this took almost all damn day. When I realized how much time I’d blown on this automotive hygiene quest, I was sublimely annoyed with myself. I was going to write and clean the apartment; I was not going to spend the whole Friday driving all over town trying to make my tiny four-wheeled beater look like new.
But there you go. And I was hungry, because I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast and it was about five o’clock. So I pinged Ellen, who was also hungry; and together we went out for Chipolte burritos.
The end.
Not my most exciting blog entry ever, perhaps.
Here. Let me make it up to you.
Have some Daily Show, and by God, the news had better run.
*
As well as the essentials — the jumper cables, the emergency kit, and the 2-ton floor jack. Because you never know, baby.** You never know.
**
My window-breaking mini-hammer, seatbelt cutter, emergency beacon, and LED flashlight are up front in the glove box. Because I am permanently prepared for the worst, that’s why.