by El Zorro Viejo (aka; Jim)

Cars; you can't live without 'em, but they are a pain in the butt. Last year, I had to have the muffler on the Saturn replaced: here it is, one year later, and the damn thing is about to fall off the car. Fortunately, I do have a warranty. However, how much do you want to bet that whatever is wrong with the damn thing isn't covered by that warranty?

Meanwhile, my wife's car has developed an nasty little "scrunching" sound which, I am told by my very knowledgeable son, is symptomatic of a dying water pump. The good news is that water pumps are not all that expensive. The bad news is that this is a '83 Olds, and getting to said pump is a major undertaking--gotta put the poor car under a general anaesthesia for major surgery. *sigh* I'm afraid that is gonna make a dent in the family budget this month.

The last straw concerns my mother's car. My mom has been out of town for a couple of weeks, visiting old friends and my Atlanta siblings, so my brother, who lives in Easton, was using her car while his was being fixed. Today we are supposed to pick her up at the airport, so my bro' brought the car back to mom's house over the weekend. My wife went up to pick the car up last night, and she brought it back to our house...where it promptly died. Turns out that the battery was so old and corroded that the positive terminal literally fell out of the battery when the AAA guy touched it. So, $131 later, it has a new battery (almost half of that was for labor...it is a real bitch getting batteries outta GM cars, it seems), and the trip to the airport is back on.

Between my brother and his wife, my mom and us, there are five people and five cars. It seems that all five cars have had something major enough wrong to warrant a trip to the garage in the last month or so. I do get bored with all this!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. ©El Zorro Viejo 2002-2005