Most of the frenetic paperwork and logistical exercise of buying a house is now complete. We are now in a lull; a two-week break while the details are settled out, and we have time to collect our wits before the madness of moving our home. Luckily we are only moving about a mile and a half, so it can either be done in lots of small loads, or a one or two humungous shipments.

It’s still unfortunately too early to release pictures onto the blog, as it’s still not officially ours yet! The moment we close escrow, though, and we have the keys in our feverish palms, I will divulge fully.

I’ve had a request to make blog posts more often: posts have averaged once a week for the past few months, now that our lifestyles have settled down; however I realise the importance of keeping everybody in touch, so I may have to start to include some minutiae, trivia and details that were perhaps not blogworthy before.

Accordingly:

Tonight I fitted ‘license plate frames’ to my car. (There is no equivalent for this in the UK, on so many levels: even if car number plates were called licence plates, and then spelled with an ’s’ to become license plates, there would still not be anyone fitting frames to them. I can only guess that the smaller size of the plates here warrants something to fill the gap!)

I bought the car over ten months ago, and it has taken this long to make such a simple amendment to its appearance! It was catalysed by one of those all-too-familiar chain-reaction car maintenance events: Due to the hot weather the car has lived in, the rubber cap on top of the window has become brittle and broken, leaving a sharp metal extrusion contacting the roof seal. The seal consequently now has a large hole in it. In the recent rain, my car has consequently leaked and got really wet inside. (The chain diverts down another path here: in opening the roof one cold evening to ventilate the soggy interior, the plastic rear window folded incorrectly and split. Gaffer tape is now employed to full effect to patch this in the no-so-short term.)

Faced with the $500 prospect of replacing the seals, compared to the $30 prospect of fitting a car cover over it at work when it rains (it lives in the garage at home), I bought a car cover. One day the cover snagged on the aged “Granny’s Garage” license plate frame at the front (weakened by the heat it has experienced – sound familiar?) and broke it.

Comical though the frame was, I had a hard time justifying any sentimentality for it, and bought some new frames this evening at a very humble cost of about $22 including fittings. Perfect for saving money for the house.

Now, down to business.

Here are the shining quality ‘cruiser frames’ – made of ‘quality metal’, no less! – that I selected from PepBoys (just across the road – really handy when you flatten the Diamante’s battery, fixing the broken rear window motor, and you need to buy a charger in a hurry).

Front looked broken, faded and tired before. Sorry Granny, you gots to go.

What a contraption for holding the plate!

New frame fitted, and it’s like a new car.

Brace yourself, back end!

Naked…

That’s better!

On the Euro models there’s a black plastic insert between the rear lights that the plate mounts onto. I wonder if it would improve the rather empty look of the back of the convertible. For comparison, here’s my champion old 4-door 1990 320i from England:

Mock ye not; that was £125’s worth of motoring glory.

Just in time for moving house, I’ve also stocked up on new tires. (I couldn’t find tyres, so I had to settle for tires instead. These seem to cause lots of accidents, as they have far less grip! Even in the dry, my ineffective 1980’s braking system still manages to cause the ABS to kick in under heavy braking.) I was planning to fit them straight away, as I have one new tire and three old ones following the incident back in the summer, but on closer inspection my fronts will last another few thousand miles, so I’ll store the new ones for a while. More stuff to shift.

We’re really pleased to have found the UK TV series Life on Mars available on DVD through Blockbuster here. (It’s rated 9/10 on IMDB, a rare acclaim indeed.) The episodes are a much more digestible 1-hour length, rather than the daunting 2- or 3-hour commitment to a film. The biggest plus, though, is that it’s like a piece of home!

Jamie did seven loads of laundry yesterday. It’s my share of the chores to put it away. (Maybe tomorrow.) In our new house we’ll have far more space for mess, so it won’t look as bad!