My New Wheels

I bought myself a birthday present...a CAR!!  Well don't get too excited...well, no, go ahead...

But the story is...the RAV crapped out and has been lodged in my driveway unable to get in any gear since Sunday.  It appears to be both the clutch and transmission and not worth repairing since, afterall, it has 249,000+ miles on it for Heaven's sake.

I went through the whole crappy car salesman rat race on Monday night.  I had dealers calling and giving me all kinds of crazy talk and I was just fending them off and telling them I had to take this one step at a time.  I was complaining to my "car guy" Webb here at the office on Tuesday morning and he says "I have a car I'll sell you!"  Seriously, it was his mother in law's car that she literally only drove to the grocery store and back.  It's a 2005 Toyota Corolla with only 28,000 miles on it!   Anyway, this is the first car I've ever bought on my own and I'm beside myself!

So this is how it all went down. When the car pooped out all I could do was laugh (because I knew it was going to happen and I was just happy it happened in my driveway), but it got funnier from that moment on...I reserved a rental car and Daniel dropped me off at the rental car office and drove off on Monday morning.  I walked up to the door to find the place abandoned.  A sign on the door said all reservations had been transferred to another office. So I called that office and assumed someone would come pick me up, but they said I had made my reservations during non business hours (yea, online on Sunday) and that they did not have a car available for me (even though I'm holding a confirmation number in my hand -- isn't this an episode from Seinfeld?) AND they wouldn't pick me up.  So I called Daniel out of school to come back and get me and take me to a rental car place by my office (the one I always use).  On the way there, we stopped to put gas in his truck and the magnetic strip on my debit card wouldn't read in the machine so he was going to take it inside to the attendant and when he tried the door, YEP another abandoned building!  We just looked at each other and said..."like is it the end of the world and nobody told us?"  It was like being in the freakin' Twilight Zone!