Cars

So after some cooling-off time and some planning, I am ready to post about at least one of the things that made this such a crazy-ass week.

A few months ago, we bought a car.  A month or two ago, the transmission died and we had to spend a chunk of our down payment fund to fix it and put off buying a house for a while.  Three days ago, the oil light came on in the car.  Two days ago, I drove it to Salem, because my carpool unexpectedly wasn't going to work out that day.  On the way home from Salem, it started making a noise.  A bad noise.  A noise that made me think perhaps the engine was going to explode or that the engine was full of rocks or that the engine was shaking itself apart under the hood.  A very bad noise.

So I pulled over on the side of I-5 and called AAA and got a tow, which was a very hot, very time-consuming, very frustrating process.  A friendly state trooper stopped by to check on me and opined that my pistons were bad, I called my dad as I always do when I am stranded by the side of the road and need someone to blither at, and finally I ended up at the car place a few blocks from our house.

The next morning we got the bad news.  Remus, our car, needs a total engine rebuild.  The engine had essentially shaken itself apart.  We must have had an oil leak, and driving it back from Salem with the oil light on basically totaled the car.

Live and learn.

So we sold the car for a few hundred bucks for parts and now we are looking for a new car.  And we're behind on house-buying timelines again, and we're both full of self-recriminations and regrets about Remus and how the last car-buying adventure turned out so badly.  And we're trying to figure out what to do.

In general, I am a used-car person, and I don't like to spend much on cars.  I was lucky in that Tonks, the car we had before Remus, was cheap and ran well with very little maintenance for 5 years, and the cost/benefit analysis on the reliability/car payment/repairs factors was way in my favor.  It was easily cheaper to have Tonks than to have a car payment, and that was awesome.  We were hoping that Remus would be the same way, but we ended up having that car only six months, and in that time spent as much as the car was worth or more on repairs.  So... now what?

Do we spend more, way more, on a much newer car?  Try our luck again on a ten-year-old toyota?  Do we *gasp* actually buy a new car and have a car payment?  (probably not that last one)  I am feeling unconfident and overwhelmed, which is not the right mood for car shopping.  Car shopping requires an odd mix of confidence, skepticism, brashness, caution and maybe even skulduggery.  I don't have the time or the energy for this right now.

Anyway, that was one thing that made this week suck.  Here's to a better week next week.