TheBanyanTree: The Fix

[PJMoney]

You know how there can come a time when you need something (say, some
Contact adhesive plastic) and you know you used to have some (because the
last time you cleaned out the hall cupboard - oooh, about a year or so ago -
there were two rolls of the stuff there) but you can't remember whether you
threw them out or not (because you bought them to cover the kids' school
books when they were in Primary School, for goodness sake, and you haven't
had a kid in Primary School for, gee, about 7 years)?  So you think, "I
probably threw them out," and feel like kicking yourself for not having the
foresight to know that a year or so later you'd finally have a use for them.

Well.  Before I put Contact on the shopping list I thought it wouldn't hurt
to have a quick look, just in case.  So I got out the step ladder, switched
on the light, climbed up so I could see the top shelf, shifted a plastic bag
full of something to one side and ... lo and behold ... there they were; two
rather dented rolls of stick-on plastic, only slightly bug-eaten.  That
meant I only had to send the boy out for two rolls of duct tape. 

It's been a busy three months.  First Mum gets cancer and has to have a
major operation right at the time when she was supposed to be coming down
with us to Canberra for the middle son's passing out parade.  When we got
back to Sydney from Canberra she was ready to be discharged from hospital
with a clean bill of health.  She had no metastases and no lymph node
involvement so the surgery appears to have been curative.  But, of course,
she's a 79 year old who'd recently been cut open from xiphisternum to pubic
symphysis and was in need of assistance with the tasks of day to day living
so I stayed with her till a couple of days before Christmas and caught the
plane home with both boys who'd been holidaying together for a fortnight at
the Gold Coast.

The boys' time together, their first episode of concentrated close proximity
for three years, had some ill effects.  That is, they came home very
irritated by each other.  At first I was so busy getting ready for, and then
preparing, Christmas dinner that I didn't notice the severity of the
sniping.  Soon enough it became impossible to miss so back I went into
Mother mode to try and encourage a greater willingness in both my sons to
jump less reflexively to assumptions of malevolence in the other and hence
to conclusions of bastardry.  I reminded them of my own mother's useful
maxim; if you can't say something nice don't say anything at all.  And I
said I wouldn't put up with it.  I've worked hard all these years to inspire
a certain amount of fear of an angry mother in my children and that effort
appears to have worked reasonably well.  At least the nastiness dropped off
by degrees until, by the time the elder flew out, late in January, they were
mostly reasonably civil to each other.

Then it was time to start getting ready for the youngest to leave home for
university.  It had been planned, sometime when I wasn't listening closely,
for my husband and the boy to drive down to Sydney together and leave the
car there for the boy's use.  Once I got over the shock of discovery and the
grief of realising that I was going to be left on my own I could see that it
was a reasonable plan to ensure that the boy has reliable transport.
(Second hand cars in Sydney typically have about 300,000k on the clock.)
And they could have some good father/son time on the way down, which is
always useful for both parties.

So apart from organising all the administrative details for enrolment,
accommodation, bank account accessible outside the Territory, new clothes,
etc., etc., the car had to be prepared for the trip. It was serviced last
week and the mechanic said it needed a new timing belt or some such thing.
That was done yesterday.  We picked it up at about 6pm, brought it home and
parked it where it has been safely parked for the last five years, behind
the Hyundai in our open-to-the-street carport.

This morning, as usual, my husband took that car and headed off to work at
about 7.30am.  About 10 minutes later, as I wandered out to the living room,
I noticed that the dogs were woofing madly at the front windows.  I looked
out, saw the car, and felt a bit discombobulated because it shouldn't have
been there.  What was going on?

Last night, sometime, someone smashed in the quarter window on the passenger
side door at the back.  Paulo only noticed because of the unusual, windy
noise he heard as he was driving along.  It seems as though the smashing was
an act of pure vandalism.  If you wanted you could reach your arm through
the hole and unlock the door, but it was still locked.  Nothing had been
taken. 

But that car is supposed to be heading south on Sunday after lunch, so today
it was up to me to try and get the window fixed.  The big problem is that
this is Darwin.  It's a small town.  A rear seat quarter window for a 98
Mazda 121 Metro turned out to be unavailable anywhere, even at wrecker's
yards.  The earliest I could get one in would be Monday, a week from now,
which is pretty good considering that we're used to waiting for stuff to
take 6 weeks to arrive, ex-Adelaide.  But pretty good isn't good enough.
Hence the Contact and the duct tape.

I traced out the shape of the window onto a piece of paper and transferred
that to a piece of cardboard taken from a box I've been waiting to throw
out.  Having cut the shape from the cardboard I sealed the edges with duct
tape and then covered the exterior with two layers of Contact.  This is the
Wet season.  Windows need to be waterproof.  

Then, having removed the shattered remnants of the old window from the
rubber seals, (I thought that sort of glass wasn't supposed to be sharp!) I
jammed my cardboard makeshift into the space and stuck it down, inside and
out, with more duct tape.  Old rubber window seals leave a lot of dirty
black marks on a person's hands. 

The fix looks quite neat.  Certainly it looks better, and feels a lot
firmer, than a bit of plastic by itself would look and feel.  But just in
case the duct tape doesn't hold and the cardboard goes flying off into the
Never Never on the way down, I had to make another appropriately sealed and
plasticised cardboard filler that will be ready to fill the space.

One of the things I was worrying about concerning this road trip was the
stuff my son will be taking with him.  There's a computer tower, a monitor
that will work with PC, Play Station and TV signals, and a DVD/VC player.
If the glass hadn't been gone in the window those blokes might have thought
it reasonable to leave all that gear in the car at each of their six
overnight stays.  Now, with just cardboard filling the space, they'll feel
more motivated to cart all the expensive stuff up with them to each of their
rooms.

All I'm left to worry about now is this; will the vandals come back while
I'm here, all alone, for the next fortnight. Oh, and there's the big
spiders.  I can smack a big cockroach without much trouble but those spiders
are so huge and they run so fast that they scare me a lot.  And then there's
the occasional big lizard that somehow manages to find its way inside even
though we do have rubber seals on the doors.  Jimbo, the youngest, has
proved himself excellent, several times, at helping me move them back
outdoors.  But he won't be here.  And neither will his father be here.  Dear
me.