This is what happened: Headlights at 21:16

"The best time to fix the roof is when the sun it out." A slightly more modern metaphor is, "change your lightbulb when it is still day." My personal application (which I have yet to learn) is, "don't change your headlights in the dark."

I forgot the context, but one evening I had also driven my Odyssey to meet my mom at Costco so I could get gas. As I was trying to follow her car out of the parking lot, she stopped, called my cell phone and told me one of my headlights was much dimmer than the other, and to go replace them immediately. It was dark. I asked if I could go get it in the morning, and she said no.

Did you know you can't change one headlight? They come in packages of two, even, but everyone and every site on the internet says you must change both at once. You also can't touch the bulbs with your bare fingers, or they will burn out in a matter of days. So I bought a pair of new headlights, drove home, and had to wait until my engine cooled off before reaching inside and messing around.

I spent the cooling hour looking at first through the manual for instructions, but the procedure wasn't even referenced, so I went inside and searched for instructions on changing headlights on a year 2000 model Odyssey. The instructions are hard enough to follow, I think, with adequate lighting, since it's all in text and referencing parts of the engine with names that mean absolutely nothing to me. As soon as I started, with construction worker's gloves and a flashlight between my teeth, I realized pictures wouldn't have helped anyway; what I was working with was almost always visually obscured by other engine parts.

This is what I had to work with.

I can't tell you what I did, because most of it wasn't correct, and I spent a lot of time unscrewing parts I ultimately didn't need to, and removing entire plastic panels just to get vision of the wrong section, and getting my hands very, very greasy. Now you might not know this, and I certainly didn't see this coming, but the access routes behind the left and right headlights are not symmetrical. There I was, 45 minutes in the darkness, sweating and now heavily salivating over the grip of my flashlight, proudly having taken out one headlight and finding everything on the other side unsettingly unfamiliar.

The most difficult part of the night, measured by time spent on a single step, was installing the new lights and trying to get them to stay. There's this little piece of metal behind the holding mechanism that locks the headlight into place, and it's held into its hinge by a screw. However, it pops out quite enthusiastically when you are removing a headlight, and I wasn't paying attention to its original position when I took both the original ones out and dropped the first one, and caught the second. For over ten minutes I struggled with getting this oddly-bent piece of metal in the correct orientation, and which part to insert first, and at which angle, all by feel since I couldn't see anything and my mouth was tired.

Here is a shark riding shotgun.

I had long since given up on the gloves since I needed the tactile feedback, and everything inside a car engine is coated with the most stubborn glue of oil and years of dirt tempered by engine heat. Like during all my high school physics tests, I was reconstructing in the moment what I should have taken the time to memorize and understand ahead of time. Finally, with a hardly-satisfying ping each headlight locked into place. I reinserted the large rubber stoppers I didn't even know existed prior to that night, put the sections of a plastic vent back into place, replaced the panels and tried my best to close the engine without getting the grease over too many things. It took me a day of constant hand washing to get my hands clean again.

Though I did feel like a bad-ass from that hour of entirely manual labor, it took much more time to fix in the night than it would have taken during the day. Or at least with proper lighting.