Well, I finally jettisoned my 14 year old Ford Tempo, which was begging to be put out of its, and my, misery. It still ran OK (if grumpily), but stuff kept breaking. A month ago, for instance, the exterior driver’s side door mechanism shattered because of the Chicago cold, so that it couldn’t be opened from the outside of the car. Both doors were hosed, in fact. The locks had long ago broke on both doors, and the passenger side door could still be opened from the outside–that’s how I got in the car, obviously–but you had to manually press down on the outside door handle before closing it, or the door would fly open while you were driving. And the driver’s side seatbelt reciever was broken, so I was plugging my belt into the passenger side receiver…anyway.
Aware of my straits, and rather more proactive than I am, my mom, visiting from out of town, took it upon herself to go car shopping and basically called me out of the blue and presented with a car she found. All I had to do was go in and sign the papers. (Which made it about as good a car buying experience as one could hope for.) It’s a 2006 Hyundai Accent, Charcoal Gray, with quite a few more bells and whistles than the Ford. My family has owned a number of Hyundais, and always been pretty happy with them. First of all, stuff works on it. Doors, locks, seatbelts…the whole smear. It’s 12 years younger than the Ford, and has under 32,000 miles on it, so hopefully I can keep this car for a good, long while at the rate I add mileage. The Ford also got horrendous gas mileage, and with petrol here expected to hit $4.00 a gallon before summer, that is a major advantage.
Bad news…well, I HATE owing money. Even with an interest free loan from the Bank of Mom (and yes, I’ll be 45 later this year, and am fully aware of how pathetic that is), it will be three years at best before I can pay the car off, and man, I really hate owing money. I realize in our society a $8,000 debt is weirdly small to be someone’s largest such ever, but that’s how I roll. And given how much money I make, my debtophobia serves me well.
However, I think the car is pretty sleek, it works, it should be highly dependable, last a good long time yet, has four doors, which I prefer…all in all, it’s about as good as I could hope for, or want, barring winning some Publisher’s Clearinghouse money. And I have to say, it’s nice to have a car that I can actually get into and drive somewhere without a nagging fear that maybe it won’t start when I get back into it. By the way, this is NOT a sneaky solicitation for people to hit the tip jar. (I mean, if Bill Gates is out there, fine. Otherwise…) I appreciate people using the Amazon links, but with that actually paying for my bandwidth costs and Netfnow, frankly I don’t think hitting the tip
