It’s the end of the world for the Camry

I didn’t want to address the End of the World thing because it’s kind of annoying.  While I know there is a large group of people who believed in the whole thing, I think the majority of rational people didn’t – which it why it annoyed me so much that it was getting so much news and social coverage.  There is a group of people who believe in Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster too, but those don’t get a ton of news coverage anytime one of those crazies claim they spotted it.  So I just don’t understand why it deserved all of this coverage and hype.  Though I suppose it is similar to the coverage and hype about year 2000 and what would happen when the clock struck midnight.  I still remember what New Year’s Eve party we were at and how someone turned off the lights as soon as the ball dropped – but no one was fooled (and we were probably too drunk to care).

The biggest thing against the Mayan calendar craziness is that it didn’t account for Leap Years, so this would have happened years ago.  (The person who told me this also said Daylight Savings Time, but since we move forward an hour in the Spring, but move back an hour in the fall, it evens out and that wouldn’t have an effect – and since DST has only been going on for the past century, it also wouldn’t matter).

I did, however, enjoy $5 appetizers at Liberty Tavern last night for their End of the World party – though I would have preferred a discount on my margaritas!  They do have a lot of tasty gluten-free appetizers though!

Unfortunately, it was (probably) the end of the world for something last night….Lo’s car.  While we were driving home from said Tavern (by we, I mean a completely sober he) and approaching our road, the car starting making a crazy whirring sound.  I was all “whoa, what’s that?” and he said “I think it’s the wind against the car” (because it was crazy windy).  And then seconds later he didn’t have power steering or gas power anymore.  Luckily there wasn’t any traffic that we had to stop for to turn onto our road and he was able to coast onto the road and halfway up our driveway.  He used my car to push his car into the garage.

It seems pretty likely that it’s an engine issue – and considering his car is a 12 years old and has been paid off for years, we aren’t planning to put much money into it.  It has fairly low miles for a Camry (less than 150k, I think?), but still wouldn’t be worth putting more than about $1200 into it.  We intended to buy a new car after we got our tax return in February or March to replace one of ours (though we expected we’d replace mine since it’s smaller and he hates to drive it), so we’ll just bump our schedule up to January and start looking when we get back from our New Year’s trip to Siesta Key.  Since we work together and do most everything else together, we can get around with one car for as long as we need to find one to buy.  We are grateful that we’ve been good about saving (though I know we can do better- and will probably have to do better once we have a car payment again) and have built our saving account back up after buying our house, so a large down payment won’t hurt us terribly, though it always hurts to part with a large sum of money.

I’m grateful that even in a crappy situation we both have a pretty good attitude about it – because it could have been worse.  We could have been further away from home without the option of coasting home.  It could have happened today during our 3 hour drive to visit my family with our dog with us.  It could have happened on our way home from work yesterday in the horrible traffic and rain – and if we were stuck in the middle lane we would have been screwed.  So if there is a perfect situation for your car breaking down, this was it.  So yes, our timetable moves up for buying a car (the hardest part of that is trying to decide what car/suv to get).  And yes, we have to drive my smaller, less powerful car for all of our holiday traveling.  And we personally know several people who are dealing with truly sucky situations this holiday season (cancer, home break-in/theft, sick or recently passed pets), so we recognize we have a lot to be thankful for.

In other news, we got our first snow of the year (I think  – we’ve had flurries, but I don’t think anything ever collected.  Personally, I could do without ever having snow, but I did choose to live in Ohio and I’m comfortable driving in it, unlike ½ of the population of Columbus who seem to think that their cars will fly off the road unless they don’t constantly hit their brakes and go 35 on the highway (because constantly hitting your brakes on snowy roads makes sense….durr). This was about the extent of it while Lo was taking Boof out before bed.

And it’s just in time for Boof to wear her new coat!  We bought her this coat a few weeks ago at Big Lots, but even though it’s the correct length (which is how you buy dog clothing), she’s a little too, um…husky for it to go around her midsection (it’s okay girl…me too).  So we had to add extra Velcro pieces so it would fasten underneath her.  As much as Lo doesn’t want to admit it, she actually seems to like to wear clothes and she came over and sat down right in front of me so I could put it on her.  And then she sat and modeled for several pictures.  It’s safe to say that she perfected the standard “over the shoulder” model look.  She sat like this on her own – it was the second picture – she’s a natural.