2003-05-22 2:13 p.m.
The Sedan of Evil
Bad, bad diarist. I've been on vacation without being on vacation, if you know what I mean. But my real vacation is coming up soon, so expect updates to continue to be pretty sporadic. There are foofy umbrella drinks to be drunk and tacky Hawaiian shirts to be bought and books to be read in a nice shady spot fanned by tropical breezes. This is my charge for the next two weeks and I take it very, very seriously.
But until then...
My poor little car is laid up in the shop. It was kind enough to have many expensive parts go south a week BEFORE my warranty expired. Good car. Goooooood car.
However.
Since I have a zillion things to do before leaving on vacation, this is one of the few times when not having a car is a huge inconvenience. And it's forced me into a position that I really, really don't want to be in.
I'm borrowing TheBoy's car, and TheBoy's car and I don't get along.
TheBoy's car is a perfectly sensible and reliable 10-year old sedan. It's precisely the kind of car I used to go through at the rate of one every 2 or 3 years. I'd buy them for $1500 or $2000, use up the last 10 or 20,000 miles they had left in them and then have them die on me, sometimes in spectacularly unpleasant ways.
When my most recent Sensible and Reliable Sedan spontaneously decided to stop running while I was driving it across a busy intersection (age: about 200,000 miles), I'd already been planning to buy a car. A real car, the first car I'd ever had with less than 150,000 miles on it. (15, to be exact, and half of those were from my test drive.) And thus the Flashy and Impractical Convertible came into my life.
I'm not sure if TheBoy's car knows that I have shunned its kind in favor of the Flashy and Impractical Convertible, or if it just senses how many of its ilk have had me as their last driver. Does it smell the smoke from the one that caught fire? Does it hear the engines of the tow trucks that came and dragged its compatriots away to be tossed around a junkyard and then crunched down into undignified little cubes? I don't know. All I know is that the first time I borrowed it, it locked me out, set its car alarm a-blaring and would. not. shut. up. TheBoy claims that the alarm only goes for 30 seconds, but maybe that's just for other people. In any case, a dozen people materialized when that alarm went off and they all just stood and glared at me. I swear I heard the car snickering.
So today I faced down my old nemesis. I climbed behind the wheel and its alarm light glinted at me malevolently. It's behaving, mostly, but its locks were balky and every once in a while the automatic seatbelt cuffed me in the head, just to show me who's boss.
When you're left undriven for two weeks, we'll see who's boss then. Ha!