I cannot tell you just how excited I was when I finally learned how to close LuLu’s sliding door and I feel so proud each time I successfully close it. I still haven’t been able to lock it, though I was unable to get out one day. You could say opening the door from the inside is still a challenge.
Even more recent than that, I learned how the back seat works. You see, the back of the bench seat and the seat of the bench seat are not connected in any way at all. They are two completely separate pieces. The back of the seat moves and can recline, as expected. One day, when we reclined it for a project, we “broke” it. We couldn’t move it any more forward and we couldn’t move it any further back. It was just stuck in one place.
Obviously, it should move but for the life of me and anyone who tried, we could not figure it out! Then, when my nephew was helping me with some prep work for my boutique sale, I got fed up and I told him to just pull (and I would push). Our collective efforts fixed the positioning and resulted in a very cool discovery. The seat has hooks behind it so that it doesn’t pull forward when you’re sitting in it! That was what it was catching on so once we freed it, I was able to re-hook the seat so it would once again be stable. It was so magical!
And the most recent of them all, which I find both curious and frustrating, is a discovery about LuLu’s battery. I will preface this by saying I am no stranger to car batteries. I’ve assisted in changing them, cleaning posts, and jumped many, many cars. So when we recently had some trouble getting the battery cables back on the posts of LuLu’s battery, it wasn’t anything I was particularly unsure about. Red is positive. Black is negative. Put them on, tighten them, voila! Battery connected.
If only it were that easy.
For what it’s worth, had I not been on autopilot, I probably would’ve noticed my error. It turns out that LuLu’s battery cables are not red for positive and black for negative. The red cable is the ground cable and goes to the negative terminal and the black cable goes to the positive terminal. What. Why? I have no idea. I learned that perhaps older Volkswagens use a brown cable for the ground cable, so maybe red is closer to brown to differentiate the cables? Could it be that the cable is brown and I just wasn’t paying close enough attention? Honestly, at this point, I couldn’t tell you.
Every day is a wild ride with LuLu, but learning the ins and outs of what makes her tick has truly been a wonderful experience. I feel like she gains sentience in a way that other cars have not. I don’t know if I’ve said this before and I’m not sure its something that anyone explicitly knows about me, but I love old cars and I’ve always wanted one. I’ve always assumed I was incapable of restoring one and buying a restored older car seemed out of reach. That left me assuming I’d never realize that dream. With each passing day, though, I realizing I am living that dream and its a beautiful feeling!
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