Dave's car

Another long pause in blogging. I'm going to set my goals low and just write about car stuff today.

Dave had (yes, had... I'll get to that later), a Hyundai Sonata 2002 that served him well for years. I wrote about some of the things that happened around the time we moved such as helping my mom with the garage sale in GR, cleaning the apartment, the trip to OK, and finally moving up here to live. Sometime in that time period something, or rather, multiple somethings, climbed into Dave's car. I started working at the Pharmacy before Dave had to go to school so he did things around the house like mow the lawn. The lawn mower ran out of gas one of those days so Dave got into his seldom-used Sonata to get to God's Country (our gas station name, no lie). As he got in he decided that the car smelled like dead fish (he doesn't like fish to begin with, so it was really bad). Despite that, he turns the car on and sees that the air coming out of the vents is providing tufts of fur, and now despite even that he travels to God's Country and gets the gas. When I get home he is telling me about this issue and we decide the next course of action is to get the car looked at. I go to work the next day and he takes the car in. Turns out there's a "rat's nest" in the air duct, full of dead animals. I put quotes around rat's nest because it could have been mice or other smallish animals, we will never really know. The smell was so atrocious that the first mechanic would not deal with the clean-up and found someone else (with a stronger gut) to do the job. Even after cleaning out the inside area of the car and Dave cleaning the interior, the car smelled a little rancid. Dave's solution... air freshener, but not just any air freshener, Peach. Since Dave had not begun the school year yet he decided not to be literate and chose the orange colored air freshener thinking that it had an orange smell. Not so, this air freshener was distinctly labeled "Peachy Peach." At this point the car started taking on an artificially sweet, fruity dead animal scent, so delicious.

The car also started making additional sounds coming up to stop signs. Dave's parents were concerned about his commute to work and suggested that he needed an all-wheel drive vehicle. We knew we couldn't afford one of those fancy hybrids (plus I'm not sure if they have AWD), so we started looking at Pontiac Vibes. Started looking at, and ended up buying over Labor Day. Honestly, I'm a little bummed about the money, loss of money I should say, but if it really helps Dave in the winter it will be worth it. Hoping to pay it off sooner than later. I just hope that he doesn't forget how to drive stick completely, being that it's our first automatic. I'm loving the automatic locks and spacious cargo room (when you fold down the seats, it's pretty regular size when they're up) of the hatchback.

Eventually I will get to talking about our jobs, at least I got the car news out of the way.