I bought my first car in August 2009, a manual Saturn SL 2001. I was so proud of myself for finding a good car and negotiating a good price for it by myself. I drove it everywhere, 20 minutes to work every day, 30 minutes to church three times a week and an hour to see David when we were dating. In September 2009, I found out that one of the gaskets were cracked and that oil was leaking into my coolant. Everyone told me this was harmless, so I bit my tongue kept on driving.
When I got my job as a manager, I was driving in between three coffee shops, putting on about 200 miles a week. My car never complained or protested.
In April 2010, David and I moved into downtown Minneapolis. I had a part- time job at Dunn Bros Coffee shop about a mile away, so my car was enjoying a brief period of retirement. But eventually, the car was victimized by the evils of big city living. I found my car in the alley one morning with one of my windows broken and my doors open. Since I was broke and pregnant at the time, I bandaged it up with packing tape and left the doors unlocked from then on. Later I found my car had been rifled through again, and my gas-milage notebook and CD's had been taken. Seriously, who still steals CD's?
In September 2010 we moved to Virginia, and so my first year with my car had come to an end. In that whole time I had been pulled over twice, received three parking tickets, spun out in the snow once, bought two pairs of tires and had been broken into twice. Not a big deal for a year in the life of a car.
The first few months that we lived in Virginia, we left the car in Minnesota to the care of my brother, who lovingly nursed it back to health. He changed the tires, the wipers, fixed the radiator, and who-knows-what else. While visiting our family over Christmas, we were reunited with our dear car, and decided it was time to take her home with us. She carried us on the long journey home to Virginia where a knew life awaited her.
Her first couple weeks home were pretty quiet. We visited friends, went grocery shopping, went sight-seeing. The third week we had the car, she was towed from a friend's apartment building. The fourth week we got a parking ticket during a snow storm. The fifth week we got lost looking for our church, ran a stop sign and got a traffic ticket. The sixth week the car wouldn't start and we found that the starter needed to be replaced. The seventh week (this morning) David went outside to replace the starter and found that the car had been towed from our own parking lot (where we pay to park) for being parked over the line in an abandoned corner at three in the morning.
Considering that more bad has happened in the past four weeks than has happened in the last year, I think either my car hates Virginia and wants to go back to Minnesota, or God hates my car. Either way, I think it's time to reconsider the future of our personal transportation, because, at this rate, our car is going to end up costing more than David's education. There goes my ticket to personal sanity and freedom.
One more ironic fact: today happened to be the day that David was going to take me out for dinner for the first time in two years. Interesting.
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