Personal Update: Das Auto ist sch**sse

Another thing to vacuum away life energy (in the form of less free time) has been the necessity to spend time hustling for and performing maintenance on automobiles. Grrrr!!!!

About the time that our family was struck down with the plague(q.v.), I managed to blow up the engine on my Honda. Before I get into the story of how the Honda died, I must explain my current vehicle predicament. Our budget is strained to the limit because of the need to recover financially from my 40+ month sojourn in the financial wilderness. (We had to put off maintenance on the car and the house and even our health.) In the autumn of 2006 the freeze plug blew on the engine of my ancient cargo van (this was the second vehicle), and since we now have enough transportation needs to require at least two vehicles in the family, it became necessary to quickly acquire another vehicle. I didn't want to alter my debt to income ratio officially in such a way as to ruin my credit rating. Both problems would be solved if I purchased my dad's third vehicle (a Honda Civic DX coupe) on payments.

I had thought that my dad had taken good care of the vehicle since in the past, when I was growing up, he had spent much of his time tinkering and maintaining his family's vehicles (he kept them up fairly well). Well, in his old age he has not been as diligent and the vehicle I purchased from him (at Blue Book value) needed work right away (rear brakes & drums, cv joints, and unknown to me radiator service). I got the brakes & drums and cv joints fixed right away and did the normal maintenance. To save time and effort, I took the vehicle in to Jiffy Lube for an oil change. After you resist all their other sales pitches for maintenance that you need but don't have the money for, you pay the $39.95 plus tax and get out as soon as you can. Car nuts will tell you that going to Jiffy Lube, Firestone, and other types of such places is a disaster waiting to happen to your vehicle. I don't know if the Jiffy Lube people put anything into my radiator (they said that I needed a flush), but a few days later as I was driving home from work (28 miles each way), I started to have a cooling system failure. I would drive the vehicle until the "check engine" light came on and then pull over and shut down until it cooled off. I finally came to a stretch of road where I could not pull over for a while. Finally when I could pull over, as soon as I came to a stop, the radiator blew a two inch hole and steam and sludge came out from under the hood. I had the car towed to a friend's house (my mechanic) and few weeks later he was able to start repairs. After we replaced all the cooling system parts, we discovered that we are getting large amounts of water in #1 cylinder. We figure the head is warped and since to get a new head or machine the one we have is about $600, we decided to get a new engine. It was supposed to be only around a $1000.00, but it was actually about $1600. While all this is going on, my mechanic, Kent, had a friend of his give him an old beater Plymouth Gran Fury Police Edition car that he would give to me. All I had to do was license and insure the vehicle. It took a week and $135 to get everything bureaucratic taken care of. I've since had to purchase about another $30 in misc. parts to keep the thing running ok. At least the Ford (the first car that Janie mainly drives) is still operational (at only 120,000 miles my least worn out vehicle). The Honda was completed on Friday, but the van is still dead and starting to become a growing medium for some alien life forms from here in the humid Northwest.

Thus by being an American where it is so bloody important that we have our own cars, we have this profound drain on our time and resources. In the Puget Sound, we do have a rudimentary mass transit system but nothing convenient like Germany. Economically, God has blessed me by positioning my lot in life at the high end of the working class. I can't imagine what even poorer people must do to just get to work and to the store etc.