Where Things go to die

Update: 6/11/08, 2:15 p.m.:
Daniel has requested that I run an update regarding the place where things go to die. Effective Saturday afternoon, I now have replacement cupholders to cover the big hole. Daniel ordered them online and had them mailed to me.

The plan last night was for Shruti to come over and for us to spend an hour or two rolling up the programs for her engagement ceremony and placing them in little gold rings.

So Shruti comes over around 9:30 p.m. and shows me the folder of programs that we are going to roll up. Then she opens her bag to get the little gold rings and realizes she left the little gold rings at her office in Princeton.

OK.

Princeton is only about half an hour south of here so I figure, no problem, we'll just take a ride down there and pick up the gold rings. Great, Shruti says, we just have to stop off at my apartment and get the key to the office.

So I drive her over to her apartment and she disappears for about 10 minutes while she searches for the key. She comes back out to the car and says she can't find it anywhere, and I look through her purse while she goes back into the apartment and searches more. It's one of those gray magnetic keys that opens electronically locking doors. About 15 minutes into the search, she finds it.

And promptly drops it into the hole in the center console of my car.

While I was living in Boston I left the car parked in my mom's space in California and left Daniel with the key. During that time, the cup holders once located in the center console disappeared. (Daniel insists that someone broke into the car, stole the cup holders, locked the car back up and left without taking anything else.) So what remains is a big hole where the cup holders used to be.

This is apparently where Things go to die.

First Shruti tried to reach through the jagged hole and succeeded only in pushing the key deeper down. Then I thought I'd be more successful and succeeded only in completely losing sight of the key. I spent the next 45 minutes reaching around in there, cutting up my hands and wrists. First I used the tire gauge, then a pen, then the broken end of sunglasses, in an attempt to reach further in. Shruti went inside her apartment and got scissors and a flashlight. We drove back to my apartment and got pliers and a coat hanger.

I found pens, Really Old French Fries, a pair of sunglasses I'd been looking for, a year-long parking pass to Mount Rushmore, a slew of different scraps of paper with directions, lots of coins, lots of sticky things that I'd rather not think about, plastic things that may or may not be part of the car, two chapsticks, and more. But no key.

The driver's seat was filled with sticky, sticky Things. So after 45 minutes of this treasure hunt, I got a screwdriver and disassembled the center console and pulled it over the parking brake.

As I pulled the center console off, I heard Shruti on the phone. She was talking to her dad, who she had been visiting about 45 minutes away before she came over.

"Did I leave bags of gold rings in your car?" she asked ... "Oh, they're in your trunk?" ... "Oh... no, you don't have to drive all the way back here." ... "No, that's OK." ...

I found the key lodged in the carpet under the console. But the rings weren't at her office.

At this point it was nearly midnight and if we drove to her dad's house we wouldn't get back until nearly 2 a.m.

So I reassembled my car and we drove to the only 24-hour store in the area, a Shoprite. (Every WalMart and Target here closes at 10 p.m.) We figured we'd buy some gold curling ribbon and use that instead. They, of course, didn't have gold curling ribbon, which left us exactly where we were at the beginning of the night -- nowhere.

So that's where we are. I took Shruti home and told her I didn't want any more of her crappy-ass luck and that I'd go to Michael's today and roll up the programs myself. So if anyone's in the mood to come over and help before Sunday.......