July 21, 2005

New Car Redux

Okay, so the new car, well, the used car... er, the car I bought to replace the Metro... is pretty nice. I suffered a day or two of Buyer's Remorse after I picked it up, because honestly you have to be insane to spend savings on a car while you have no job.

But on the other hand I'm not COMPLETELY broke, I've got some checks coming in, and if any of the companies that owe me Serious Money were to actually cough up what they owe, I'd be doing okay. Still, this is the kind of thing that keeps me awake and staring at night, while during the bright light of day I realize that we will be fine. Over the past year and a half we have paid off all our debt (except for our home mortgage), so if we really had to, we could go back into debt for a bit.

But driving the car has been very pleasant. Picked up our family friend Debbie from the airport last night, and enjoyed her inability to locate my voice as coming from the nice sedan in front of her, rather than some crappy purple Metro. Then she brought her luggage over, and I pulled the wrong switch and popped open the hood instead of the trunk. Smoooooth.

The A/C works wonderfully well. The CD sounds nice, except I discovered that it can't play CD/MP3's. Tut. Why not just put a vinyl album player in there instead, sheesh. And when I filled the tank, I managed to top it off for $19, so still under $20. This is a completely meaningless and arbitrary measure of course: if I really don't like spending more than $20 to fill the tank, I could just dump a few rocks in to take up space.

And for the time being it's both clean and quiet, something that couldn't be said for the Metro ever since someone *cough*spouse*cough* bottomed the car out on a rutted road and snapped the exhaust system off the manifold. On the other hand, we haven't had to change the Metro's muffler since that time, either.

Now that I've mentally wrapped my head around the purchase and decided to keep it and enjoy it, I have to figure out what to do about the Metro itself. It's a real piece of junk, but on the other hand it runs good, gets good mileage, and has a nice stereo in it.

I'm open to suggestions!

Posted by Albatross at July 21, 2005 3:37 PM