My New Car

[wolven7]

My New Car, originally uploaded by fenryswlf.

So, as you know, I've had two cars catastrophically fail on me within the past year. In the middle of all the other shit for which I've needed money (and it has been a LOT), I needed to be able to get to and from Kennesaw, for teaching.

I looked up cars, and eventually settled on a 2011 Kia Rio. It was a manual transmission, but I've always wanted to learn stickshift anyway. So ext_325066 was crazy/generous/crazy-generous enough to offer her knowledge and vehicle to teach me to drive manual. I need a lot more practice to be truly comfortable, but it went fairly well for my first extended time behind a manual trans.

So we went to the Carmax, and we got into the car... And we realised that there was no Air Conditioning or Power Steering.

Now, I can deal with learning manual-- as I said, I WANT to-- but learning a new way of driving, in a car with no power steering & no a/c?

In Georgia?

I think not. I think that sounds like a recipe for passing the fuck out.

So we--unknownbinaries, ext_325066, and I-- went looking around the lot, and we found several other cars, in the price range. This one-- a 2007 Ford Focus with 42,024 miles-- was about $1.5k more than the Kia, but the monthly payment is not much higher than what the Kia was going to be.

So, on the whole, I'll end up paying roughly $3000 more overall than initially planned for a Newer car, yes, but it's still used, and it's an automatic, rather than the manual transmission I was intending to buy. Payment's at $285/month after $500 down.

Don't think about it don't think about it don't think about it.

And I'm still going to continue lessons with a manual transmission, whenever someone's available, but the long and the short of it is, I need to be able to get to work on Tuesday, and I don't know anyone available to teach me, today and tomorrow.

Finally, I have a shit ton of papers to grade, so... fuck it. I just needed to get this done.

It took six hours, in total, to get this shit handled, from driving there, to getting home. Just... Just Terrible.

I missed not_hothead_yet's party, because we were just so exhausted all we could do was get home, eat burritos, drink dark and stormys and watch 'Brick,' with ext_325066.

Still didn't get to bed until 4am, somehow. So Very Tired.