One More Class to Go This Semester and I am Wearing Thin...

This pretty well describes my experience in grad school thus far.

If You Give My Dad a Can of Rustoleum...

... he's going to want a jar of spot putty to go with it.

It's been a little bit 'If you Give a Mouse a Cookie' around my house this week. My parents are visiting while I'm on spring break from work, and my mom mentioned on the phone to me last week that they were bringing some stuff down to repair a few rust spots on my car. The conversation was something like "Oh we have this stuff, like a rust stopper, and I just thought we could spend a little time and put that stuff on, and then paint over it- you know, it's going to look great or anything, but it will hopefully stop the wheel well from disintegrating as you're driving down the highway one day." Okay, I agreed. That all sounds reasonable enough. Let's do it!

Oh, Karen of a Week Ago. So naive.

As we began to chip away at the relatively small area of rust, it revealed more rust underneath... and above, and to the sides and on and on. Power tools got involved and pretty soon the surface area had doubled, and then quadrupled. Alright, so there was a little MORE rust than we originally thought, but no big deal. We sprayed on the rust stopper and let it dry. In the meantime, my dad and I started watching DIY car repair youtube videos from the 80s, involving a product called Bondo Hair, which looks very much what I imagine would happen if you got an entire jar of peanut butter stuck in your hair. "Hey" said my dad. "This stuff looks better than the poly fiber strands we brought down. Maybe we should check it out at the hardware store." Okay, I agreed. There's an Advanced Auto Parts mere miles from my house. Let's do it!

Oh, Karen of Two Days Ago. So young.

On our way to the store we stopped for gas. While pumping, I was reminded that my windshield had been awfully streaky lately. "Hey dad, I noticed recently that my wipers have some little strings hanging off of them- is that bad?" He lifted one up and started laughing. "Uh, yeah. Those need to be replaced." "Really?" I asked? "How often are you supposed to do that?" He gave me a pointed look. "Every six months or so." I've owned my car for three years. Guess how many times I've replaced the windshield wipers?

So now wipers were on our shopping lists. It was about this time that my dad noticed that part of the casing on one of my back doors had become detached. Now, we can't have that, can we?

What had started as a minor spray-paint job had quickly evolved into an episode of Pimp My Ride, except I was drawing the line at painting lightning bolts down the sides of my car. (I drive a Ford Taurus. The idea of racing stripes doesn't exactly go with the 'roomy interior' and 'sizeable trunk space'.) It took multiple trips to both Advance Auto and Ace Hardware, but eventually we got our act together and would you believe that it actually worked?

Before:

*Not my actual car because we forgot to take a 'before' picture.

And after:

*Also not my actual car, but a spitting image. What can I say, I'm lazy?

Not too shabby, right? Only took eight hours to finish and a minimum of four years off of my life. All that stress makes me really want to go for a cookie. And if I'm going to have a cookie, I might as well pour myself a glass of milk to go with it...