The Grey Car With The Red Door...

I bought my little grey Pontiac Vibe back in October of 2010. In December of that year, I hit and killed a deer in my car. That was a bad night. I had never hit and killed a deer before. It's something I never want to have happen again.

I began my daily blog in January, 2011 and one of the first posts talked about the incident. You can read that post: HERE. It was the fifth blog post I wrote.

In February of 2011 I went ice caving with the scouts. The car had been fixed in January and things were looking good. The front end had had been painted before I bought it from a time it was damaged by its previous owner. And the guys who fixed the car after I hit the deer did a better job than whoever fixed it before.

I was happy about the new front end.

Then I went with the scouts and shattered the window. You see, I lowered the window with the car door open and when I closed the door the window shattered inside the door frame. I didn't realize it until years later, but I believe when I hit the deer, it screwed up that window. Since it happened in the winter, I never rolled it down until months later. I never put two and two together and I have no definitive proof, but I'm pretty sure the accident was the cause of my window troubles.

I wrote about the window-shattering incident: HERE. After it happened I took the car into a glass place and they replace the window. The problem was, every time I lowered the window, it came disconnected to the mechanism inside the door, so basically the window didn't work. I took it back again and again to the glass place and each time the same thing happened. I thought "no big deal--I don't need to have a working window."

I was wrong.

It seems in order to be legal, the only window in the car that must work is the driver's side window. And mine didn't. Since 2011 I've been able to get the darn thing to work just enough to pass inspection. But this year, all my tricks had been used up. I knew I had to do something.

And that something was a very permanent solution. I bought a new door. A few weeks ago I picked up the door and spent a couple of hours putting it on my car. I'd never done anything like that before.

How did it all work out? Wonderfully! It passed inspection on the second to last day of the month before my old inspection sticker was invalid. Still, I have a hard time lowering the window. I think it's not going to work. Maybe the next time I'll try it is next October, just about inspection time.

Well, There's Your Problem Right There...

As I drove my car home tonight, the driver's side window fell. It's not an everyday occurrence. There's history between this window and me, history going back over two years.

A few months after I got the car back from repairs after the Deer Kill of '11, I was up in the mountains with the scouts. It was winter and we had just had an overnighter. Just after the event we were gathered to come home. With the window down, I tried closing the door and it wouldn't close. I applied some pressure to close it and the window shattered inside the door. My boys and I had an interesting drive on the way home from the mountains in winter with a window missing. I wrote about it in one of my earliest blogs and you can read that blog: HERE.

I tried having it fixed several times, but each time it kept breaking. It got to the point where we rolled up the window and kept it there and that worked okay. Then today happened. I spent a couple of hours tonight fixing it and when I took the door panel off, I realized what the problem's been all along. The good news--I know how to fix it. The bad news--it will have to wait a while. But for now, we'll just keep the window up and the A/C slash Heat on.