Sue the Tenacious and Chuffed

I am not sure how to tell this succinctly and coherently, but I shall try. I may fail at telling it interestingly, however. It is a story that highlights my wife's ingenuity and tenacity.

Let me begin with the ending, or close to it, which happens to be Sue scrabbling in the ice and snow in the park.

Now, how do I tell it from here?

Weeks ago, Sue was carrying the tripod through this park to take a selfie of some sort. It turned out that she never used it, but she did notice, at about this location, that a piece had fallen off the tripod head.

It was the little piece that I've circled in red on this ↓ photo, the bit that says, "Lock."

I'll now use this next image to show the size of it compared to her fingernail. 

Remember, it's the little circled thingie inside the little knobby thingie.

Somehow, she saw it, picked it up and put it in her pocket. We didn't realize the full ramification until later, however. That occurred on the night that I took my tripod to the bridge to shoot the night lights and realized that my tripod head was broken. The whole knobby thingie (outlined in green, up above) was gone, and that the tripod was therefore, like me its owner, dysfunctional.

After another week, and probably three weeks in total, we had lost some of the snow cover, and Sue determined that we should return to the scene of the crime, as it were, and  look for the knobby lever thingie.

If you go back to the top photo of Sue scrabbling on the path, that is where she found it. Yup, she found the little thing embedded in the ice — after several weeks! She used her handwarmers to heat the ice and the car keys to pry the knob loose.

The little divot within the red square is where it had lain embedded in the frozen snow.

We came home, and she put the tripod head back together; lo and behold, it functions once more. 

Sue is more mechanical than I (well most people are, squirrels and crows too), for while I had thought that the tiny round plate thingie was decorative, she realized that it was meant to actually hold the lever in place. It's a poor design, in my opinion, but that is how it was designed to work.

My lady was quite chuffed with herself for finding the two pieces despite the odds and then putting the the device back together into workable order.

I'd say that she had good reason to be chuffed.

And I am happy to have a functional tripod once again.