A mechanic is niqui!

Originally uploaded by sldownard.

Shoelace!

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So. On my way out of the parking lot at the fiber fair — and by “parking lot” I mean “grass” — there was a bump which caused me to scrape the underside of my front bumper, pulling out onto the street. I thought little of it beyond “damn, you guys could fill in the craters once in a while.”

Five miles down the road — in some suburb between Crystal Lake and Elgin — there was a mild bump in the pavement, after which my car started making an unpleasant scraping noise. I was on the phone with Kim at the time, and pulled off into the nearest handy parking lot, which happened to be a (plant) nursery which was closed for the day, which at least kept me from getting funny looks from anyone except a couple of employees leaving for the day, one of whom eventually walked over and stared at me without saying anything — I assume he was planning to ask if I needed help but couldn’t quite find the courage to actually speak, and/or overheard me talking on the phone with Kim and figured I was crazy for babbling about yarn while messing around the underbody of my car. Anyways, I got out and looked under the car, and what had happened was that the skid plate — which is a plastic sheet that covers under the oil pan, etc, between the two front wheels, from the front lower valance all the way back to behind the axle — had lost its front bolt and fallen, and was scraping along the pavement.

(Side note: a replacement skid plate is $160. I say again, Crystal Lake, you couldn’t fill in those craters once in a while?)

But I am a girl of no small amount of ingenuity, and I fixed my busted skid plate, right there in the parking lot of the Platt Hill Nursery: I tied it up with a shoelace from my ice skates. Laced it up nice and tight right through the bolt holes – the ones other than the one in the front which was ripped, presumably from the force of a bolt being pushed through it. I even tucked the ends of the laces away neatly so they wouldn’t drag on the asphalt.

Hey, it worked. Shut up!