For most of this month, I have driven Dave’s car to school.  We’ve had some big snow, and some deep freeze, and my car is just not cutting it anymore.  He emailed me yesterday to say "By the way, I don’t plan on driving your car next winter, too."

My car is a 95 Ford Escort, LX, baby, and it’s been paid for for over three years.  It has 135,000 miles on it, and has driven me across the country and back, and all over New England and the southwest. It has been rear ended, sideswiped, backed into , and rear ended again.  The driver’s side seat belt stopped working in Boulder, Colorado, in 2000.  The brake light has been on, permanently, for just as long, it seems.  The gas door doesn’t close anymore, and the back doors are hard to open and close, probably from a twist in the frame, is my guess.  The heat doesn’t work anymore, well, it does, but only from the panel vents which is the worst place for heat to come out of in the winter.  (Dave doesn’t even turn on the heat when he drives the car.)  Exhaust fumes leak into the passenger area, now, and the check engine light comes on sometimes, and the washer fluid may or may not spray onto the windshield when you ask it to.  It’s a dying machine, it is.

We have planned on not getting a second car; I hate my job, I want a baby, I want to stay home at least part time, and we could probably swing being a single car household if I don’t go back to work.  However, I’m still not pregnant, and at this point, I might just do one more classroom year because of the benefits I would reap from that.  (If I were to magically get knocked up this cycle, I would be due in November, and I could do 2+ months of teaching and then decide what to do, because in my third year, I would get tenure.) And, I might not get pregnant for awhile, and I’m thinking that maybe I should just live life and do what I need to do now, and hope that a baby becomes a reality at some point.

So, I had seen a car online at a small dealership in the town I teach in.  Dave and I started talking about it, and we went out to look, and it ended up looking MUCH smaller in person than it did online, so that one’s out of the picture.  But now we’re thnking that maybe we should just suck it up and get a newer car for me, with the worst case scenario being that we have to unload it in a year or so.  Dave does work for several of the big dealerships, and is well-liked by the CEO of the one we like the most (and where I got my current car, nine years ago) and is also a Ford dealer, and I’m back to wanting a Focus wagon. I think.

Fuck, though, car payments are such a bitch. And insurance and all of that.  But my current car is worth less than 1k, and it would cost as much as that to fix all that’s wrong with it, and as my parents have said "That car doesn’t owe you anything."  It really doesn’t, and the plan has been to drive it into the ground, and I’m starting to feel like the ground is rising to meet the car really quickly at this point.

I think I may have to bite the bullet and suck up a car payment. Fuck. I hate car payments.