Take the wins

Muritai clothesline sculpture

The last week was suboptimal in a number of ways. Headlining the suboptimality was the demise of our car engine. This demise was preceded by the demise of our roof rack. On the way to Christchurch, in the dark and the rain, a truck barrelled towards us on the other side of the road. “Woomph,” we heard. Chris and I looked at each other, because the next sound was silence, rather than the flapping of the tarpaulin covering the load on the roof rack.

Chris stopped in a hurry, I jumped out, looked up at the empty roof rack, then we did a rapid U-turn and drove back the 500m we had travelled since the truck passed us. There were oncoming headlights closing on bits of roof rack in the road. I jumped out of the car, waving frantically – in the dark and the rain. The ute with trailer didn’t see me. “Crrrrrrunch,” went the roof rack under its tyres.

We stood by the side of the road contemplating the splintered roof rack and the packaged clothesline sculpture on the road verge. There was no way the clothesline would fit in the car and there was no way the roof rack would reattach. A ute pulled up facing towards us and a beefy guy in hi-vis jumped out. “Can we help?”

“No thanks, mate,” Chris said.

“How are we going to get the clothesline out of here, Chris?” I said. To hi-vis guy, I replied, “Sure. The roof rack blew off and then the next vehicle drove over it even though I was waving at them.”

“That was us,” hi-vis guy said.

“Oh, right.”

We picked up the clothesline package and secured it in the trailer. Hi-vis guy drove it 10 minutes down the road to Tarras and dropped it off there. Chris and I had a little argument about whose fault the detaching roof rack might have been so the best next scenario was for him to drive back home (1 hour there, 1 hour back) to get the trailer while I sat with the clothesline outside the firmly closed Tarras cafe.

By the time Chris returned, I was able to see hi-vis guy as a win because it meant I was sitting on a chair for two hours, rather than the highway verge. I got a lot of work done in two hours and then we headed for Christchurch with the clothesline secure in our trailer.

Over the next three days in Christchurch, Chris diligently put the clothesline sculpture together and we fixed it to the wall. This sculpture has been no small task. I had one of my bright ideas, like the seagull gate. We need a clothesline in the back courtyard at Muritai, our Christchurch townhouse, and the wall that gets the most sun is a direct sightline from the house. Standard clotheslines are not things of beauty…how to solve the problem? The obvious solution was a sculptural clothesline! I imagined a frame filled with multi-coloured, multi-textured glass, and we started the process.

We glued up the frame out of leftover cedar from our house build 10 years ago (the left-over materials were a big win, there are still plenty of other leftovers remaining). I ordered glass and acrylic mirror panels to fill the frame. We got steel bars for the clothes line and right angles made to support the frame. Then I had another brilliant idea – wouldn’t it be good if the frame was lit up at night?

Chris made a visit to Jaycar, who supplied small LEDs. The next step was joining the LEDs at the right spacing to fit the frame. A visit to Redpaths and a useless $300 connector crimp later (you can’t crimp two wires of different sizes with the same connector), Chris discovered lovely connectors with a solder strip that can be melted by a heat gun. Then he set about the many hours of joining connectors and wires onto the 25 LEDs and checking the circuit still functioned.

200 hours of work or more went into the clothesline sculpture, along with a fair amount of money, so we were very reluctant to unwrap the package once in Christchurch given our fear the whole construction might be wrecked. But it wasn’t – another win. The corner was damaged, but not so severely it couldn’t be repaired with a few pours of epoxy. It was another day before I dared try the LEDs, to find…they still worked!

We put the clothesline up and admired it in the day time and night time. Total win. Our neighbour has asked us to get a timer so she can see it at night when we are away.

The following day we headed south, back to Gibbston. Near Geraldine, the overheat sensor came on in our Ford Everest as the engine temperature spiked. Then the temperature immediately dropped. Then it spiked again. We stopped and checked the engine. It didn’t seem to be particularly hot. We checked the coolant – liquid in there. Three minutes later the engine cut out. Over the next two hours we got towed to Geraldine (my first time ever in a tow truck…it was fine but I don’t need to make it a habit ). The local mechanic took one sniff and said, “That’s the smell of death.” He started the engine up and it make a horrible clanking sound. “Third piston,” he said. “It’s the one that gets deformed when the engine overheats.”

Chris organised for the Everest to get towed to a Ford dealer in Ashburton while I worked in a cafe. Our friend Franco turned up in Geraldine a couple of hours later – he was headed to Christchurch. Another win – a lot better to get a ride with a friend than the Intercity Bus. Franco dropped us in Sumner where we could readmire our clothesline. Next morning, we returned to Gibbston in Chris’s sister’s old Forester which successfully towed our trailer all the way home. Another win.

I think about what Donald Trump might have done in this situation. At what point would he have said, “I’ve won.” Like he said he won the Iran war on 12 March (he claimed they won in the first hour of bombing) although the war appears to still be underway today on March 28th. If I take Don Don’s lead, I’ll say we won when we got the clothesline up. The demise of our car on the return journey is a mere annoyance on the way to winning bigger and better, bigly, even.

There is the possibility of a bigly win…after the car broke down I was rummaging in the glove box and pulled out a letter from Ford which we’d forgotten about. It said Ford is aware of an issue with its vehicles which can result in coolant leakage and engine overheating. The letter made a one time offer of repair if one of a list of problems occurred, including a sudden warning of overheating. So now I’m totally channelling Trump. We have the letter. We already won. Ford will carry out an $18,000 engine replacement for us. I’ll keep my fingers crossed, too, just in case channelling Donald Trump isn’t sufficiently strong (black? orange?) magic.