No-Brainer

Yoko’s comment on While Angels Check the Treads:

Wow. What happened to your other car? (sorry if you’ve already explained this– I’ve been offline for a while.)

No worries;  it was the first time I’ve mentioned anything about it.  Nothing happened to it, if by “happened to it” you mean something calamitous like I got into an accident, or it threw a piston rod or the like.  But the venerable Nightshade is 16 years old and has over 91,000 miles on it;  the suspension goes kktung when you drive around corners, the horn is mute, the lock cylinder in the rear tailgate has fallen inside the door, sealing it closed, the tinting in the back windows is peeling off in sheets and the driver’s side door is staved in from the night I had one snort too many and ground it into an iron support pillar in a parking garage.  Plus it’s about 7,000 miles overdue for service-  and due for inspection in November.  Under the much discussed Cash for Clunkers program, I get $3500 for trading it in, which is far more than it would be worth were I able to sell it (which I can’t;  it was declared a Total Loss by my insurance company after that five-car accident I was involved in a couple years ago, at the top of Route 33.  How were they supposed to know my parents were life-long friends with an auto body repairman who would agree to reassemble it?)  In return for the trade (and an admittedly scary financial commitment), I get a cool, new vehicle with vastly improved gas mileage that’s safe, mechanically reliable, and doesn’t have to be re-registered or inspected for another 4 years.  Total no-brainer.

Gotta clean all the junk out of Nightshade this morning.