Blue Cyber Monday

For about ten minutes, today was a really good day.

Things didn't start off very promising; I'd slept in past my intended target hour and was wondering as I checked e-mail if I was going to get any of the four things I needed to get accomplished that I'd listed out last night:

1. Mail dropoff at the Post Office
2. Fluid top-off/computer inquiry at Valvoline
3. Return/exchange at Borders
4. Cyber Monday orders (if applicable)

Cyber Monday was pretty good for the store this year, and by the time I'd generated the shipping labels for the stuff sold from the store account (and the couple that had sold from my own), it was already nearly 3:30 in the afternoon. Thus, I arrived at the Willowick Post Office at one of the worst times to visit any such place (the late afternoon), and true to form, I lost a half hour of my life waiting in a seven-person line that moved slower than a herd of turtles. Good lord, I hate these places. As I was mailing a couple of international packages for the store, I didn't have much of a choice in the matter and did my best to reach that inner state of Zen I seek whenever I find myself trapped in situations like these. I can't put into words how glad I am that I ponied up for that postal scale back in April and am able to do most of our shipping from work or home: it gets very easy to understand exactly how and why people "go postal" when you are the second person in line for fifteen of the thirty minutes you are in these horrible places.

Despite the clammy, frigid conditions and the barely detectable snow flurries that fell like tiny grains of sand from the slate gray sky, it felt positively wonderful to finally get the hell out of that post office and back on the road, even if it was Vine Street at 4 PM. I made Record Den my next stop, and spent an hour there packaging all of the Cyber Monday orders that had come in by then and ultimately managed to get them all of them ready for our typical 5 PM mail pickup. Two objectives down, two to go.

After spending an extra half hour attempting to wait out the worst of the evening rush hour, it was off to Borders to return a couple of bookends I'd purchased the night before. The traffic on Mentor Avenue was still pretty grating to deal with, but it was at my destination where the day suddenly took a surprising turn for the better.

A bit of background explanation: I am completely out of room for CDs in the office. All of the shelving units behind me are currently packed end to end with music, and there is no more room for any more shelving in here. While selling a few hundred pieces on Amazon had partially eased this problem for a while, but nearly all of my recent online listings had been coming from the boxes of CDs I have stashed in the closet (most of them banished here years before for the crime of only having one good song on them or whatever other reason I could come up with). As a temporary solution, I decided to take the box sets out of their alloted space and move them on top of these shelves for the time being, using bookends to keep them in place.

When we finally came across these bookends last night, I was a bit crestfallen to find out that that they were freaking expensive (at least the cool-looking ones, anyway). After some chin-stroking and frowning over the options, I selected a pair that were by some measure the cheapest models available. Problem was, they were also by some measure the smallest and lightest models available. Upon getting home, I quickly deduced that these little guys were not up to their intended task and opted to return them the next day and use the exchange credit towards a set of more expensive (and weighty) models.

After leaving my too-small set at the front counter with the same clerk who took care of the sale last night, I headed back to their "decor" section of the store to pick out the cheapest, heaviest set I could find. To my considerable surprise, the simple, elegant green marble "triangle" style that I had looked at the night before had magically been marked down thirty dollars over the last twenty four hours to $19.99 a pair. Fuckin' score! Elated, I grabbed two sets and wound up spending only ten bucks on top of my exchange credit.

A bit flush with success, I decided to stop over at Kohl's (as it was right down the plaza from where I was parked), hoping to find some slipper socks and lounge pants for my dad's Christmas gift. While hunting about for the above, I came across a winter hats sale (50% off, natch) and picked out a couple of new "beanie"-style caps for myself as well as a couple of convertible hat/mask thingies for my younger brothers.

From there, I had to make a bit of a mad dash clear across the county to fulfill my last objective: a monthly topping off of car fluids at Valvoline, hopefully along with a resetting of the Saturn's computer. A few days before, my SERVICE ENGINE SOON light had come on and had kindly provided some company for me to and from work over the holiday weekend. Touched by the gesture, I took the Saturn to Autozone on Sunday and had the problem diagnosed as the gas cap not sealing correctly. A problem very easily corrected! Hurray!! Since the Autozone tech could not reset the computer once I had replaced the cap, I took a chance that the Valvoline guys could do it and was pleased that they could and did. With all of my objectives completed, I grabbed some Chik Fil-A and headed home feeling a real sense of accomplishment and of things being in their right place. Hell, I even just beat the train signal on E 305 and didn't even get the red light at the South Marginal intersection. It was a truly wonderful ten minutes.

As I was coming home and maneuvering through the parking lot, I noticed the SERVICE ENGINE SOON light came on again. I was a bit surprised and irritated, but not really worried as the problem had been corrected. The tech at Valvoline had told me that if that light came on again, then I'd need to take the car to a shop to get it looked at, and it was that scenario that annoyed me more than anything else. After dinner, I drove the car to Autozone again just to be absolutely sure that the gas cap was (somehow) still the culprit here.

Great news! It wasn't!

Instead, I was presented with an all-new error message that read "GEAR 1 RATIO INCORRECT," which based on my research appears to be a kind of mechanical shorthand for "your transmission is having minor issues that are not going to go away and will likely become totally fucked at some point in the future."

So, yeah. Great. Wonderful. Coming right smack in the middle of my Christmas shopping (and just after a recent splurge purchase on my behalf on a couple of box sets), this may be my most impressively-timed bit of bad financial news since about August of 2006.

Bah. One of these years, I will enjoy an entire holiday season without once worrying at any point about future insolvency thanks to something inside of a car I own picking that particular point to cease working correctly. Believe me, when this happens, y'all will be the first to know.

NP: Devo Duty Now For The Future

Staycation '09

My 2009 vacation, such as it is, kicked off today in suitably relaxed fashion: we went off to MicroCenter to pick up a couple of USB/PS2 adaptors for the computer as I am maxed out on available ports, got the Saturn's fluids topped off and serpentine belt replaced and then spent the evening hanging out and watching DVDs (and listening to a few cuts from 5.1-enchanced classic albums) with our friends Eric and Katie down in Seven Hills. A very pleasant start indeed.

The reason for the "such as it is" qualifier is that this vacation will be marred by one work day towards the end. When setting this week up, my replacement during the week informed me that he couldn't fit Saturday the 8th work into his schedule, which for a few hours had me debating on delaying my furlough for a week or two before coming up with a secondary option that suited us both. The original plan had been for me to work the 1st, and then take off the 4th through the 8th (which, with weekends bookending, would have me off the days of August 2-10). The amended plan works out as follows: I am now off August 1-7, I'll work the 8th (which actually should allow me to get caught up enough that I don't come back to a huge pile of e-work on the 11th), then I'll still have the next two days off as a normal weekend. While this isn't exactly the ideal scenario I'd had planned, it's still a very workable option, and I get the keep the nine days off ... only with a hiccup towards the end.

Despite the onset of my first week off in exactly a year, I wasn't in a very good mood Friday night as I'd been battling a sore throat for the last 36 hours and was rather annoyed at the timing of this seeming onset of illness. Luckily, I seem to have triumphed over this cold or infection or whatever it was, having been free of symptoms since this morning, though I'm currently sucking on a Cold-Eeze and sipping on a glassful of Airborne just for good measure.

As for what comes next, there isn't much to write about right now. I'm still not 100% caught up on remaining bills that were delayed by the purchase of the Saturn, thus I plan to spend most of this year's vacation off at home. I can't presently afford to attend multiple baseball games as I did on last year's break (not that I am presently in the mood to do so following the events of the past few days ... more on that later) or doing much of anything else that involves the throwing about of moolah. The only possibility I am considering for a daytime trip right now is heading over to Geneva On The Lake and seeing how the ol' Strip looks. Beyond that, you can just call me "homebody."

Road Trippin'

During the typically endless Northeast Ohio winter, thinking of a clear, sunny, warm summer afternoon while the frigid wind batters at the screen door is a kind of masochistic exercise, largely because such weather feels so impossibly far away. Even when we are treated to that rare summer-like May, and our hopes rise that maybe we're getting an extra early start to the best part of the year, we usually have to endure a cool, clammy, damp early June in a kind of final cruel tease before we are (temporarily) back in paradise once again.

Yesterday, Summer 2009 finally arrived, a perfectly-timed warm and dry end to a week's worth of humid, inclement unpleasantness. For the first time in far too many years, I could think of no better way to celebrate than to head out on a little exploratory road trip in the new MeMobile. While my plan had initially been for a for a full-on all-afternoon excursion, a cluttered schedule coupled with many of the main roads of Lake County being presently ripped to shreds forced me to instead wait out the evening rush before heading east down Route 2, past Painesville and into the rolling countryside.

The idea of going on these aimless trips again has been in the back of my head ever since I started going to get my E-checks done in Painesville Township, rather than off Lost Nation road in Willoughby. After one visit a couple of years ago, the leisurely drive back home (detailed here) took me back to better times when driving wasn't so much a dry, functional part of the day as one of the highlights of the day itself. A time when you didn't have to be anywhere at any particular time, and you could just pick a direction and, well, go.

Even from when I was a kid, traveling by car to my relatives or on camping excursions to Upper Michigan was something that was almost as much of an adventure as the destination itself (save for that soul-sucking 300 mile stretch of Interstate 80 across northern Pennsylvania, anyway). One of my many obsessions as a youngster was maps and roads, and I was always flipping through Dad's old hardbound atlas he kept from his college years, occasionally furling my brow at places that had changed names (or phonetical spellings) over the previous fifteen years. Dad would also bring home newer maps from business trips domestic and foreign. and I would literally spend hours poring over them, memorizing names, locations, routes, mileages, trying to imagine what these places looked like and generally marveling at the sheer scale of the American transportation system and, ultimately, the world itself. I suppose all of this made my later love affair with astronomy that much more of an obvious next leap forward, but I digress ...

As a teenager, I was delighted to find that my love of driving simply for the sake of driving was shared by the friends I'd fallen in with in high school, and we spent many Friday nights piling into Brian's car and embarking on so-called "Psychedelic Mystery Drives," which was basically 4 of us tooling around the sticks in the dead of night listening to music that had absolutely nothing whatsoever in common with real, actual "psychedelia," but nevertheless sustained a kind of eerie, dreamlike atmosphere that made these trips something I looked forward to every weekend.

Though college inevitably scuttled the regularity of these group night drives, I never lost my zest for just taking off and tooling around whenever the mood struck. To be quite honest, that mood struck pretty frequently in the years just after graduation, as home was not a fun place to be on pretty much any given night. In time, these drives became a convenient way of escaping a bad situation for a few precious hours until things died down (i.e., everyone was asleep). It also helped that gas was cheap, time was a luxury and the conversation was good. Whether it was Brian or Rob or Mike being in town for a weekend or summer or Kris being as bored and restless (and perhaps as anxious to get away from home) as I was, I was rarely at a loss for company when the urge struck to hit the road.

On the rare nights when I was alone, I made the discovery that many who are passionate about music already knew: there is something special about listening to an album end-to-end in a car with nothing else around to divert your attention away from the experience. With the volume up, the landscape unfolding before you, and your own solitude to free your inhibitions, you can sing along, pound the steering wheel in time to the beat, and savor each moment in a fashion that can only be approximated at home with a good pair of studio headphones and the lights down low. I'd say that maybe half of my favorite albums of all time became my favorite albums in exactly this way.

A funny thing: the last time I drove a car with a working cassette tape drive was 1993 (and I don't think that particular unit had worked properly since 1991). When I took over the payments on the Fiero from my brother in 1994, I also stepped into the world of CD car audio, and right around that same time, the night drives stopped.

As fashionable as it might be these days, I'm not going to blame the end of this era on the compact disc (though having a CD player in my car instantly wiped out the need to constantly make new driving mix-tapes to listen to): there were a lot of external factors at work by now that gradually wound this part of my life to a close. First and foremost, my close circle of friends had begun to gradually widen as Rob, Kris and Mike either got married or simply drifted away from the area. Also, I was in a pretty delicate state, still getting over the total meltdown of my first serious relationship the previous fall, and was thus far more motivated to get drunk and numb than zip around the outskirts of Chardon at 2 AM.

My home life had also settled down considerably over the previous two years, thus the constant impetus to get the hell away before another fight broke out had been pretty much erased. I had also met a girl and while this would ultimately prove a rather stupid mistake (and what is referred to as a "bounce-back" fling), things were going pretty well and being with her took up most of the free-time I once had set aside for myself. By the summer of 1994, the only long drive I made with any regularity was down to Brian's apartment in Cuyahoga Falls: an hour-long jaunt that I'd made so many times that it felt more like driving to downtown Cleveland instead of nearly all the way to Akron.

A few years later, the Fiero and I parted ways, and for over a decade afterward, I got by with nothing but a radio in whatever car I was driving. Actually, I didn't really listen to anything at all: I'd basically abandoned FM radio in disgust at the end of 1998, and save for a few weeks after September 11 when I had news radio going 24/7 or listening to late innings of Indians games during my drive home the last couple of years, driving back and forth to work became my "quiet time": the one point in the day where I don't have music going around me. For many years, I didn't mind the near-silence at all, but after I got the Saturn, I started to realize I was missing it.

One of the last things I worried about when deciding whether or not to buy The Saturn was the sound system. All that mattered to me at the time was that it had a working AM radio for baseball games: no consideration was given to music at all. The fact that the Saturn came with a cassette deck as well as a radio was more amusing to me than anything else, since I'd been selling used cassettes for years to customers who had purchased used cars only to discover that they had cassette decks in the dash rather than CD players. After years of smiling in commiseration at their tales, I was now one of them.

With the Saturn now legal and with a shiny new muffler installed to quiet it down, I got the itch to try out the sound system, and thus had a fun few days reacquainting myself with the second shittiest audio platform of the modern era: the prerecorded cassette. God, I didn't really miss these things: portability and convenience aside, they were on the whole a terrible waste of money to anyone who actually enjoyed listening to records multiple times in decent fidelity. I grabbed a half dozen oldie moldie faves from the used bins at work, and discovered over the following week that only two of them actually sound well-balanced, spacious and clear, while the others range between noticeably tinny or have those spots where you hear that awful, warbly, half-eaten submerged gurgle that indicates damage (or repetitive wear) to the tape surface.

While the cassette drive still worked beautifully and the heads sounded like they were in good shape, most of the Saturn's speakers sounded like someone partially fried them playing something loud and bassy. That problem was dealt with by simply flattening the low end of the EQ, but that action resulted in the prerecorded tapes, mixed and mastered in the treble-and-reverb crazed late 1980s, sounding even more unpleasantly shrill than before.
After weeding out the sonic weaklings (sorry, The Church, A-Ha and Julee Cruise, but back to the Record Den shelves you go), I spent some time rummaging around the office closet this afternoon and found a box full of old TDK SA-90s, mostly new wave-themed compilation tapes I'd made over a dozen years ago. I selected a few, filled up a box of old time traveling music, and took my drive, stopping on the way to take some pictures of an old railroad bridge near State Route 84, just east of Painesville.

Today, in effect, was all about getting in touch with an old habit that didn't so much "die hard" as "go dormant for fifteen or so years." It's great to be able to do this again: even after so much time passed and so much has changed, it's still a lot of fun and a great way to unwind and relax in a world that sometimes seems increasingly hostile to both.

Over The Hump

You know those times when you’ve been behind the 8-ball for what feels like forever, perhaps beginning to despair that you might not ever catch up with your suddenly-ballooning finances? Somehow, after a major expenditure, it seems like everything comes due at the same time and what seemed like a pretty great idea a month ago has had you privately second guessing yourself ever since.

Then, along comes that unmistakable day where things finally start to feel right again: the highest hurdle has been cleared, and looking down the path ahead, you begin to realize that everything is actually going to get better from here on out. For me, that day was today.

I'm not going to be out of the woods for a while yet, maybe the end of July, but the Saturn passing E-check today (despite the presence of a hole in the exhaust system that only made itself known over the last five or so days) was a tremendous relief nonetheless. Now that the car is finally legal, I can start lining up and systematically dispatching waiting bills and ratcheting down the stress to a far more manageable level. Life can be pretty dramatic, and I should be familiar with this feeling, but it feels wonderfully new everytime it happens.

Of course, not everything came up completely rosy today: I have now lost my second Western Digital "My Book" external hard drive in the last six months and I am absolutely furious with that once-trusted company. As with everything else in this increasingly disposable world of electronics, the new model crap withers and dies while the older models soldier ever onwards: my oldest WD drive (a pre-My Book era dinosaur) is not only is it still working wonderfully in its current capacity as electronic jukebox for the Record Den, but also taking a fair amount of abuse doing so. How surprising.

Luckily, my friend Dave has most of the data on this drive already saved from the last time I had a drive fail, and that dead HD had ironically been migrated to this one. Assuming Dave can save what needs to be saved from what was so recently known as Drive K, I face a bit of a data-archiving quandary in that I have 3 other "My Book" drives still active and all of them nearly full-to-bursting with data. Obviously, I can no longer trust any of these drives not to fail in the near future and I will need to figure out a non-WD solution as to how I'm going to backup these drives before taking great pleasure in destroying them. For now, they are going to be used as little as possible until I can back everything up safely to DVD-R for a least a short-term solution (a project that has started in earnest as I write this post).

Lessons learned today:

1. Life does not always suck nose. There are indeed times when all is well ... or at least trending that way.

2. Never slack off on backing up your data, people: especially the important stuff you can't live without.

3. Fuck you, Western Digital. Seriously. Go take a long walk off a short pier.

Vent

Sorry, reader: this post is going to come off as unnecessarily defeatist and angry. I hope you'll understand and bear with me (or better yet, skip on down to the next entry). Normally, I try to ride these lows out without a word in here, but it's now a little past four in the morning and I don't do "peppy and upbeat" when I haven't had any goddamned sleep in 4 days.

That's right: my insomnia has not only persisted over the last month, but has also worsened to the point that right now, nothing can make me fall asleep. Zilch. Nada. Niechievo. Benadryl? Stopped working last weekend. Unisom? Hasn't worked in weeks. Even fucking Ambien, my only guarantee of a good night's rest, has no effect on me (and discovering that last night was a pretty nasty and spirit-breaking surprise). My caffeine intake is now near-zero (I'm not sure how much caffeine is in a Snickers bar, but that's all I've ingested since Tuesday afternoon), I've walked a mile or so every night in a vain attempt to make myself sleepy, listened to ambient music for an hour before bedtime the last three nights, and all of this has had absolutely zero effect on my condition. Tonight, in a final insult to normalcy, I took a Clairitin-D an hour before retiring, and the near-knockout effect it usually has on me every single time I take one utterly failed to materialize. Of course. Sarah has a bottle of Trazodone on her desk that I can try tomorrow night for the sake of trying it, but I have about as much hope in that working as I do in popping some Dexedrine and washing 'em down with a can of Jolt.

So, now what? Obviously, I'm going to have to see a doctor about this, and here is where we come to the oh-so-diabolical timing of this condition worsening: even if I wanted to see a professional and throw a lot of money I do not have at this problem, I simply can't do it right now. As I mentioned previously, buying a new car two months earlier than I'd planned to has utterly nuked my finances to the point where I have already-delayed bills and obligations lined up for the next 3-4 weeks, and they must be taken care of before I can go getting myself into another medical adventure.

Speaking of the Saturn, by the way: to the kid(s) who ripped the temporary tags off the back of my car for a lark (or whatever the hell reason it is you assholes decide to fuck around with anonymous cars): thanks a ton, jackass. That was really hilarious. Seriously. I just love spending even more money and time running around to the police department and the DMV on unnecessary, redundant bureaucratic bullshit. By all means, keep up the good fight and display your little prize proudly. You really stuck it to the man this time! Rock on!

In happier Saturn news, my long-awaited title to the car arrived today, which means I will soon be able to put plates on the thing (the sole task that is holding everything else up that I have to take care of behind it). However, I was also informed while getting my new temp tags that I will need to E-check the Saturn before I can put plates on it, which means that the balding driver's side front tire will have to be replaced this weekend in order for the car to get tested ASAP. The front tire was a known repair issue when I bought the car, so that is no big deal in and of itself. As for the E-check ... while it appears that I have nothing to worry about in that department, I hope y'all can understand that it's very difficult for me not to imagine another shoe waiting to drop here.

Oh yeah, at some point yesterday, the shelving units mounted on our kitchen wall came crashing down to the floor, splattering their contents all over the place. I strongly suspect the hand (or paw) of Moe in this, but who the hell knows for sure. I'm also very glad Sarah discovered this mess first, as I might have simply exploded on the spot. If there was a "good news" angle to this story: it's that a.) the cats weren't hurt by the collapse b.) the unit came off the wall cleanly and didn't pull out any chunks of plaster with it. Huzzah.

So, that's it. Venting operation completed. I cannot afford to take care of this insomnia until sometime in early-to-mid July, so I'm just going to deal with it by waiting it out, at last until I am out from behind the 8-ball. At some point, eventually, my body's demand for sleep will win out this battle and that will be that (or I will simply get used to the series of five-minute catnaps or whatever the hell goes on with me once the sun comes up). Until that time comes, I guess I get to sit around and read a bunch, maybe watch some movies, organize my sock drawer, meditate or however else I choose to kill off the hours between 12-6 AM. Whatever I choose to do, it will certainly beat lying in bed, wanting to scream and/or cry, and listening to the fans running for hours. Whatever the hell is wrong with me, one way or the other, it is not going to last forever ... it just feels like it right now.

The New Vicmobile

Following the failure of the Beretta to pass E-check, my initial plan was to coast into July and allow myself plenty of time to save up the necessary funds and search out a replacement vehicle at my leisure.

Life, as always, had other plans.

On May 21, I was returning home from visiting Dad at LakeWest (sadly, his home away from home anymore) and idling in line at the Chick Fil-A drive-thru when something gave under the hood of the Beretta. There wasn't a bang! or crack! or anything dramatic like that, just a sudden, tangible change in the character of the engine noise, coupled with a sinister new vibrating thrum that immediately began clattering the exhaust pipes noisily against the frame of the car. The Beretta immediately sounded rougher, louder, and wheezier than it ever had before, lending me to suspect that I had somehow just managed to wreck my brand new (and apparently useless) exhaust system. But no, this noise was different ... it was coming from the engine itself, not from the rear or bottom of the car. There was also a whiff of something burning: not gasoline, not rubber, not coolant ... engine oil?

I got the car back home and worriedly popped the hood, sniffing around and smelling that weird, wispy tang of something wrong while not knowing what it was. On Sarah's advice, I checked the oil and was relieved to see that I was still filled up and looking good. That led me to wonder about the fuel lines being clogged, or maybe the transmission being compromised. Sarah wondered if the gas tank had taken on water.

The next morning, to my consternation, the car's new running characteristics remained unchanged. I tried gunning the engine a few times on the way to work (in an attempt to "blow out" whatever seemed to be making my engine sound asthmatic) to no effect, and adding some fresh gas to the tank didn't seem to help either. In fact, it wasn't until I was cruising down Mentor Avenue in the homestretch towards work that I realized that the Beretta was actually running semi-normally once I had it cruising along in third or fourth gear: it was getting to that point where I was having problems. That led me again to wonder if the transmission was at fault here, and I found that to be the case later that evening as I noticed a large puddle forming behind the left front tire. I backed the car away from the pool and dabbed at it with a paper towel, immediately spying a thick blot of pink fluid spreading across the surface of the paper. En route home, I smelled that burning scent again, and noticed wisps of steam/smoke crawling up the side of the Beretta from the vicinity of the left front wheel well. Ah, hell, that would explain a lot of things, wouldn't it.

I had already resolved that there would be no additional repairs to the Beretta, no matter what. So, it was going to be showtime ... two months early. Beautiful. With nothing else to be done for it, I parked the Beretta in the rear parking lot at the condos, where it sits as of this writing: cleaned-out and awaiting to be towed and ultimately junked.

I did some car shopping online looking for something cheap and (hopefully) semi-dependable, while consulting a bit with my brother (who is far better versed in cars and car repair than I am). After some poking around, I'd found a possible candidate to look at, but ran into a timing snafu: Sunday and Monday are my weekends, and the used car dealership where I found my pick was closed for business on Sundays and would be closed the following Monday since it was Memorial Day. Of course.

At least with Brett being currently out of work, we had some scheduling flexibility that normally wouldn't exist between us, so we arranged to meet early Tuesday morning to do some looking around. Brett was pretty skeptical of my initial pick, a 2001 Sebring sedan, and it turned out he had good reason to be: after some close inspection of the dessicated inside of the drivers compartment, the damaged front clip, and a small coolant leak under the hood, the Sebring looked like a bad investment waiting to happen. Next!

With an hour and change to burn before I had to be at work, we headed up to Vine Street and started driving eastward, eventually coming across Transportation Outlet Inc. An initial pass through their lot didn't look very promising: I was not in the market for an SUV or pickup truck, and I also wasn't looking right now to take on a few years of car payments just yet. On the second pass, however, we finally came across what turned out 45 minutes later to be the new Vicmobile:


And there she is, folks: a 1998 Saturn SL2. Considering what I am moving up from, this rather tame acquisition feels like a freaking luxury sedan, despite the lack of CD player (the only demand I had for car audio was a working AM radio so that I could listen to Indians games on the road, so this was a forgivable omission). It's also about as far from the old hot rods of my early twenties as I could have imagined myself buying. Priorities definitely change as you age, and while my priority in 1994 was "how cool does it look and how good is the stereo?," the biggest priority I have in 2009 is "will this car be dependable enough to get me through, say, the end of 2012?" Brett thought so, and his approval of the car itself and the asking price was instrumental in me sealing the deal.

I feel a strange mix of emotions writing this: that exotic blend of giddiness and terrified accomplishment that only comes from spending most of your hard-earned money on something you really hope was worth the splurge. I think most of my friends felt this way when they walked out of the realtors office with the keys to their first house. For me, it was driving off the lot in this car. While the price was good, it was also at the very top end of my reach financially, which will almost certainly make June and July a bit of a monetary high-wire act (at least until this thing has plates on it), but so far it appears to have been worth the risk.

Happy updates are hopefully forthcoming.