So We Purchased Another Vehicle.

So, as many of you no doubt recall our car died. Well, it didn't exactly die. The engine still worked and it would start up and run and everything electrical would spring to life at our command, it's just that the drivers side wheel bearings are shot. And that is a dealer serviceable only part. Also due to our car being, “one of dem foreign cars” there wasn't a dealership within a two hour drive of my house.

The advice of the dealer was to remove the entire wheel bearing assembly, bring it in, have them fix/replace it and then take the new and improved part back and reattach it to the car. Either that or we could have it towed the two hours or so.

Needless to say that wasn't about to happen.

So we parked it at the top of the driveway, wrote 500$ or best offer on the windshield on it in soap and hopped into our 84 Chevy Truck to go car shopping. After of course we wrestled three separate eye drops into the cats eyeballs because life can never be you know, boring.

So the first place we stopped was the crazy chop shop used car lot that is located in town. Our first mistake was telling them the price range we were looking for. Our second mistake was entering the damn lot in the first place. It wasn't so much the cars, but the lady in charge of selling us shit was seriously creeping me out. First off she was like, meth skinny. Also it looked like at one point in her youth she had used too much tanning solution. Plus, she had this weird habit of taking all her jewelry off and snapping it back on while she was talking to us. So she would be telling us about this wonderful super not put back together after some horrible accident, nope never, car, while her watch would be going, snap, snap, snap. And about how they had just gotten in a little silver car that would be just perfect for us as the little metal beads on her bracelet would be going clink, clink, clink. Overall it was a lot like talking to a mummy someone had unearthed in the desert sands somewhere and taught the fine art of retail to.

The second place we stopped at had nothing under 6000$. Which when you are poor is like, a million fucking dollars. That guy seemed all right, except he had a big long list with all the prices, because putting the price on the car itself is apparently too damn hard. He was trying to sell us on a Chevy Cobalt but I nixed that one in the bud when I opened the trunk and saw the battery was in there with the spare tire doughnut.

No I am not shitting you. The battery was in the fucking trunk.

Oh but it was totally okay because he assured us “you can still jump the car from the front.” Great. Wonderful. Motherfuckers. It's not like it would be totally inconvenient for me to take all my shit out of the trunk every time I need to disconnect the battery to work on the car. Like ha ha, that would not be shit balls stupid at all.

So at this point we hopped back in the truck, picked a direction and drove in it.

We ended up washing up at a Chevy dealership. We got out of our dingy beat up pickup and walked past all the shiny new cars to the doors. Inside the lobby we were greeted by a very friendly pregnant lady. She asked what we were looking for. Scott started in on the litany, used good gas mileage, not too many miles, but at this point I was sick of it all so I was like just show me something old.

She was like, how old?

I was like, older then 2005.

She told me they had two things. Then she explained that the reason no one else in this entire fucking area would sell old cars was because they couldn't finance them so they shipped them off to a wholesaler. Then I was all like wow it's like this entire society is set up to try to lure me into being in debt. Which is totally fucked up. If by fucked up I secretly mean horrifying and terrible.

Luckily she had two things. A tore up mostly dead Oldsmobile, and a 1999 Toyota Avalon. We poked the Avalon. We looked under the hood. I laid across the seats and took a flashlight to under the dash. Two things became apparent. One it would need some minor work, a tail light was cracked, and the check engine light was on, but over all it looked pretty good.

We asked about price. We made it clear we could fix it ourselves and that they didn't need to do much to it. She quoted us a price. It was below 5000$. Which when you are poor is like winning the car lottery.

We made plans to come back, hook up our neato vehicle code reader to it after they had addressed a few issues and made it pass a WV state inspection.

To make a long story short, we went to work, came home from work at 3am, got up drove to the bank, drove to the dealership, gave the car one final inspection and bought it.

Because fuck you financing.

It still needs some work, as in replacing the oxygen sensors and a motor mount, and new tires, but overall it's a great old car and I feel pretty good about all this. It's also a Platinum Luxury Car. Which in 1999 speak means there is a CD player in the trunk.

Ha ha retro.

I think I am a hipster now.

A car hipster.

Clearly.

Of Sick Cats and Cars.

Let me start off this entry by saying that Emoticon, my sick kitty is driving me nuts. She is used to being outside. All the time. Wild. Free. Unencumbered by the trappings of society. So lets just say that trying to keep her in the dog crate so I can treat her every six hours is slowly degrading her tiny kitty mind.

And taking mine with it.

The two days or so was fine. She seemed to accept being in her crate, used her litter tray neatly, and spent most of her time looking out the window and sleeping. Which was a good thing, because we were playing Drive to All the Used Car Lots Game. This was also combined with the Try Not to Freak Out Because Everything Ever is at Least Two Grand Over Your Price Range Game.

These are not fun games.

However at some point she realized we weren't going to let her go back outside. And that we weren't going to stop giving her eye drops. So that when I got home from work last night, Emoticon was entering some sort of full blown kitty tantrum.

When the loud pitiful/angry meowing failed to produce a cage opening epiphany in her human caretakers she moved on to phase two. Phase Two involved grabbing everything she could reach through the metal bars of the crate and attempting to drag it in there with her. While I could steadily ignore phase one, phase two did succeed in drawing my attention. Because in the span of about, oh ten minutes she had managed to drag the following things into her crate: a rain coat, a curtain, a hunk of trash bag, the top and strap of a backpack, half of my cloth tool bag, and two towels.

Of course I moved everything out from her nefarious clutches that she could possibly hook her claws into, which prompted her to bang out a drum solo on the plastic tub that her litter comes in, and also a magnificent double drum solo on the jugs I used to water the animals in the morning.

While I was trying to watch a movie.

So there I was, head phones on, trying to be oblivious to to the wailing, drumming and scratching, determinedly watching my film while possibly praying for the sweet release of death. Or deafness. It gets pretty bad when you can't tell the Epic Movie Battle Sounds, from the Pissed Off Cat Sounds.

Finally I let her out. The problem with letting her out, is that she is an outdoor only cat. She has no concept that the things in my house are both valuable and breakable. So far she has drooled on my laptop key board, sharpened her claws on the window sill, knocked over everything on the coffee table, tried to bust through a window screen, toppled a trash can, tried to get in a fight with Tom Tom Tiger through the glass sliding door, fell into a back pack, knocked over Scott's hat, eaten a fuck ton of the dogs food, and forced her body between my desk and the window, knocked over the router, and thrown kitty litter in at least one pair of shoes.

I had always had indoor cats prior to moving to the country, so it came as a surprise to me how much of a tornado of destruction an outdoor cat in the house can be. Also, another thing, outdoor cats are strong. Like indoor cats? Butterballs. Mostly fat. Don't move a whole lot. Outdoor cats? Solid muscle.

So all in all I try to keep her contained as much as possible.

Although it was all worth it when she finally settled down and jumped up into my lap and curled up and then we watched the end to the movie together and she purred like a little motorboat and then the movie was over and we just sat there and I petted her and she closed her eyes and I thought that maybe things were going to be okay after all.

Until I had to put her back so I could get some sleep and she wailed for like, a motherfucking hour.

But that's okay because in the end I am sure it will be worth it and we can save her eyeballs and then she will stop misjudging jumps and taking everything down with her.

Hopefully.

The Rental Car is too Good for us.

In their infinite wisdom, the rental agency saw fit to outfit us with what I consider to be a luxury model car. It has a motorized seat adjuster on the drivers side, heated seats, satellite radio, and best of all, the air conditioning works. I can make the internal temperature of the car anything that I want. For this brief moment in time I can experience physical comfort that has nothing to do with the outside temperature!

I can finally show up to work without my hair looking like it had been through a motherfucking wind tunnel.

Except I know it's all too good to last. I know at some point they will fix our car and I will have to go back.

I will have to go back.

I will have to go back to a world where the AC doesn't work and I don't really have enough leg room and I will no longer be able to fit all my travel shit into the truck because my real car is tiny, and the breaks don't immediately break when you step on the break, and it won't tell me what show I am listing to on the radio in neat little green letters.

I was never meant to see this world.

There's something about being poor, okay? Like you feel happy just to have two vehicles that run because you personally know people that are still playing the our only car is in the shop and there are two adults in our household that have to work WTF do we do now game and you feel like you have won some sort of multicar in game trophy and that you are totally winning at life.

And then you see how the other half lives.

And it's not only better, but it's fucktastically a lot better. Better then you had ever dreamed it could be better. It's like most of you are never going to have caviar or 200 year old wine, or a 100$ a plate dinner. Which is fine, because it is hard to miss things you have never personally experienced in any way. Except I think you can buy caviar at Walmart now so maybe that was a bad comparison.

Anyway.

You know how all those rich guys that lost all there money threw themselves off bridges and shit. Yeah, I think I dimly understand that now.

What was really depressing was when I sat down and realized that this car costs more them I make in a year and quite near what we both make in a year not counting things like paying for repairs when it breaks or putting gas and oil in the fucker.

Have you ever had a moment where you suddenly felt very, very poor? Like Fuck my 29 acres and my backhoe and the fact that I can pay for my hobbies most of the time, now I feel poor because I can't afford the insanely expensive car the rental agency gave us because our insurance is paying for it?

You know what, sometimes I think the rental agency is just fucking with us. Here take this one, it will destroy your happiness and world view, bring it back with gas in it!

Asshole motherfuckers.

Asshole. Motherfuckers.

The Car has been Smashed.

So. Scott got into a fender bender. One of those blind corner oh-god-why-is-someone-stopped-around-a-blind-motherfucking-corner-incidents. No one was hurt, but the front of our car looked like someone had crumbled it up like an old paper towel because that's what happens when they make cars out of plastic.

Of course this would happen during the same week that we have a whole bunch of jobs lined up that involve driving across several states and we cannot possible miss because we need money.

Ha ha! Isn't life fun?

I was blissfully unaware that anything had happened until Scott called me and asked if I had called anybody to give him a ride yet. I said WTF are you talking about? It turns out that not only did my phone fail to record the voice mail he had left me, it didn't even ring. There was no record on my phone that he had called me at all. Which really makes me feel good about my chances of anyone getting hold of me in an emergency.

You know what? Fuck you AT&T. Fuck you in your stupid fucking face.

Anyway.

Of course the reason I was at home and not with Scott at the time was that my body was pitching a fit about something I ate (I'm looking in your direction lasagna) and I was in full blown evacuation mode. So it pretty much felt like someone was Roto Rootering my intestines. So I had to call people and then play the I-know-they-will-call-me-back-while-I-am-trapped-on-the-crapper game. It is not a fun game.

Oh and while I was on the phone the dog snuck into my office and threw up down the vent.

Yeah.

So it looks like we will be traveling around in a rental car for a week until the garage can fix our car. Ha ha ha haaaaaa! Fun! Oh joy and wonder!

Ahem.

Sooo, does anybody know how to remove vehicle related curses? Like, anybody? Is their a pilgrimage I can go on? Should I burn some maps or something? Will priests even sprinkle cars with holy water?

For the love of all that's good and holy, these things can stop happening anytime now.

Yep.

Anytime now.