vehicular pornography

The past few weeks have been a little bit of everything: crazy, fun, tiring, sad, thrilling, scary, joyous and downright weird.  I wouldn't change a thing!

Let's start with vehicles.  Remember the old blue Honda Civic?  Yeah, we'd pretty much forgotten about it, too.  It's still over at my brother's house, waiting for the day when either he is out of the wheelchair and able to work on it or we find a way to tow it over here so we can work on it.  When we parked it, it ran.  Just needed a transmission rebuild.  Then field mice happened.  Now it needs a whole new wiring harness and who knows what else.  It won't even start anymore.  So, we moved on to the station wagon.  Good, dependable car, circa 1988.  The head started leaking oil, so we pulled it to do a gasket change.  And a nut off one of the rocker arms ended up falling into the engine and somehow we can't find the darned thing.  Magnet-on-a-stick is too big to fit in the hole, we've probed every orifice (and even checked in the oil pan just in case it fell all the way through) but no luck finding the nut.  If it weren't so heavy, we'd pick it up, flip it over and shake it until the thing fell out... but it's freaking heavy.  And now the car has one very flat tire and one kind of flat tire and the engine is out and sitting on top of two old tires and we've been without a car for quite a while.

Of course, we have the truck.  And the truck is awesome and good.  But it holds exactly two people.  Unless you're a contortionist or under three, that little bench seat behind the main seats is more like a medieval torture device.  This means that whenever Peter and I and his mother want to go somewhere together one of us has to squeeze into a space the size of a cat carrier - or we take her truck and our truck.  Not very fuel efficient.

Today we added a 2003 Chevy Malibu to the mix.  It runs great, rides great and has a spacious, comfortable back seat.  And the dealership almost couldn't sell it to us because they couldn't find the paperwork from when they bought it.  Hilarity, and an hour or so of waiting, ensued.

What will become of the other two cars?  We're thinking of taking them apart, piece by piece, and hauling them to the scrap yard.  Or, more likely, we'll borrow a car trailer from someone and haul them there mostly intact.  Either that or we'll make some sort of installation art piece from them in the front yard... where it can annoy our fussy neighbor.  I'm thinking of painting them in garish shades of chartreuse and fuschia and positioning them so they appear to be breeding.  Now that's an idea!