For those of you who accessed this site via my MSN or Yahoo! user profiles, you may have arrived at the conclusion that my main source of transportation is a "pre-owned" red automobile, and that I am very fond, if not proud of it.

The gift also included the following:
1. That the car would be safely operational by the time classes started at my community college.
2. All of the repairs to make it safely operational would be paid for by the bestowers of this gift.
3. A great little antenna-ball in the shape of an extra-terrestrial's head.

I had to pay for the insurance and registration-DOT/DMV b.s., but that was okay because it was a car and it was (for the most part) free.

Now, I assumed that when they said that they would repair it by the first day of class, they would get right on it and fix it. Every time I asked Mommy about it, she said that Bill would get to it "on his days off work." Okay… So asking Bill when he was going to get around to it (because Mommy told me that it would actually be fixed before school started) he said, and allow me to quote what he said every time, "It's safe to drive now. I drove it to work for years and it never quit on me."

My Mommy took me out one Monday (for that was the day of the week that I did not work that summer) and we titled, licensed, and insured my car. The DOT/DMV wasn't too bad, and we got the insurance from our local Am-Fam agent, who also happens to be Bill's brother-in-law. I was so excited I almost pooped my pants.

I think that Mommy talked to him though, because when it came time to repair it I didn't pay for a penny of it. Turns out that one of the pipes for the antifreeze in the cooling system had rusted out, and it only took that bump in the driveway to knock it loose (I examined the driveway and I had missed the curb by several feet, there is just a dip in the driveway that I went over). Had it not happened then, it would have happened out on the highway on my way to school or out to Lacey's house or on the massive amount of re-paving the county has so graciously bestowed upon us in the last week of August.

But, alas, the car was not fixed by the time school started. So for the next week I traveled by the other Tempo and got a few rides in that sweet-ass Impala (could have only been better if a hot goth-punky guy drove me around in it). We had a cute guy named Don fix Ultra-Robusto and I even offered to pay for part of it, but Mommy paid for it and she threw in an oil change, so I was good to go.

If you are not familiar with a Ford, allow me to explain:
First, Ford makes their vehicles with a few odd standards. 1) No other piece not specifically designed for Ford will fit in any place on the vehicle, 2) everything is put together per the snap-in-place method with a few clips and as little threading as possible, 3) removal of any Ford component requires special tools, and 4) you must get really pissed off to realize any of the other three standards are completely pointless.

So noted by me and the others the night of the attempted removal.

There are four holes (one near each corner) on the face of a standard Ford stereo just big enough to fit a wire coat hanger into. I thought they were tiny screw holes at first, but then I asked my mechanic-guy uncle Chris and he told me that there is a device that resembles a coat hanger (you were wondering how I knew, weren't you) bent in a fashion similar to this diagram I tried to provide in the column to the right, but the picture wouldn't show up on the site so you can use your imagination (Ford standard #3).

The device is used by inserting the ends of it in the two holes on either side of the stereo (both need to be used) and pulling them in outward opposite directions. If this is done correctly, then the stereo should pop loose from the clips holding it in behind the holes on the face.

So, like the rednecks we are, we (Chris, Lacey and I) took to the stereo with a bent coat hanger. When this did not work, Lacey and I drove out to Wal-Mart in the other Tempo and purchased (less then $5) the actual tool. All together, Chris and Lacey and I worked at it for about two hours. Since it was nearly 11:00 PM and I had put gas in the car and we were getting a little goofy on fumes, Lacey and Chris went home and Mommy said she'd help me in the morning.

Approximately twelve hours later, Mommy and I were sitting in the car getting pissed off. After about an hour she declared that we had to "pull that bitch like a bad tooth." I just wanted to give up and live with a cassette player, but I just let her do her thing. Two sets of Vise-Grips, two large screwdrivers, and a sledgehammer later, it was out of the car (really, the sledgehammer was just to take out our distress on it in the driveway, as inferred by Ford standard #4). It turns out that the clips mentioned in Ford standard #2 holding it in place were bent to hell and we would have never been able get it out using conventional methods.

Now here comes that "although…" I mentioned before. So, applying Ford standard #1, the old stereo was wired with two plugs that neatly inserted into the back of the unit. Well, the wires on a standard new car stereo do not work this way. In fact, the wires attached from the car to the plugs were not even the same as the ones on the stereo. With high hopes, I dinked around on the abomination that is the Internet and was not enlightened. So I did the last thing I could think of; I called Auto Zone (considering that the only thing this store is good for is turning your car into a massive stereo, this was probably the most productive thing I'd done all day). Turns out there is this plug with loose wires on one end (appropriately called a "Ford stereo wiring harness") that attaches to the plug coming from the car and the loose wires are match-the-standardized-color-coded (less than $8). The guy at the store even came out to my car and showed me how and where to plug it in. Got it home, set the clock, and had it blasting Godsmack loud enough to piss off old people in less than ten minutes. And only after nearly six solid hours of labor and angst.

So I called my Mommy and she came out to school (less than two miles) to give me a jump and/or a ride home. Realizing that I was parked in such a manner that we could not jump it by, we tried to push it out of the space. Eventually a guy from one of my classes was nice enough to help push and we finally got it jumped and made it home. We plugged it into the charger, but I was still discouraged. Bill was at work, so I got a ride in the sweet-ass Impala to work an hour-or-so later. The next day when Bill took a look under the hood, he figured that there was something wrong with the alternator. Since he had replaced the alternator less than a year ago, he traded it in on its warranty and I was able to drive it to school later that day. We had deduced that when the steam was rolling out from under my hood that day way back when, the moisture shorted something in the alternator, blah blah blah. Also when Bill was putting in the new-new alternator, I decided to do a little work myself and I managed to fix the door enough to where I did not need to close it from the outside and crawl over the passenger's seat to get the automatic seatbelt to work. Before, even when I did close it from the outside, several times on aforementioned re-paving of the highways the door had slipped off the whatever-it-is that works the seatbelts and my seatbelt came off on the highway. After fixing it on Alternator Day I've had no troubles.

Come the appointment on a Friday morning, that's exactly what the brakes needed, plus new calipers. No big deal, but a little pricey. I got all the calls at work on my cell phone, as that's what I asked them to do.

"Rachel? This is Travis from [establishment name omitted for security]. Uh, yeah. Um… I took the wheels off to give it a break inspection like you wanted. Well, it needs all four brake pads replaced; the back ones are grinding, too, looks like. You also need new rotors and calipers. But there are some… ahh… issues. Well, first…"

The ahh’s and um’s and the word issues worried me.

"…first, the tie rods are shot. You need those fixed or they’re gonna break and your steering is gonna… not work. Then, your gas tank leaks, not too bad though."

I informed him to ignore the gas tank. He then said that my car was too much of a big deal to look at on his schedule for the day and he said he was going to put it back together and call me back with a price estimate. About an hour later I got the call.

"Yeah, Rachel? It’s Travis with your estimate. I found another issue. Looks like your front springs are pretty old and broken, too."

Front springs for what?

"The springs in your front suspension. You’ll probably need to replace those too. I worked the front suspension and struts-- you’ll need the struts-- into the estimate."

Well, let’s have it.

"The brakes, the whole thing, would be [about $370]. The tie rod ends would be [about another $100]. The shocks and struts in the front are [well over $500], adding to a grand total of [just shy of $1,000]."

As you can see, I rounded. You don’t need the exact prices on everything, you just need to know that it’s about 20 times the blue-book value of the whole entire rest of the whole vehicle, including everything I usually carry in that is not part of the car itself.

"May I suggest just getting a new car? This really isn’t worth it, you know? And I can’t tell you how many times people spend all this money on fixing it and then getting a new one 3 months later."

I smacked the back of my head on the wall. Twice.

"Well… what do you want to do with it right now?"

Don’t fix it.

"You need to think about it, I know. Just give us a call back later today and we’ll take care of it."

I sat down and cried. I had planned on spending about $400 on the brakes, which is about how much the whole break ordeal would have cost. But I did not have $1,000 to fix the damn thing. Eventually, Mommy and Bill decided to pay for part of the suspension bull and I'd pay for the brakes up front. They decided to charge it on their credit card and I would pay a total of $700 of the $1,000. So, that should all work out. I'd rather just get a new car, but that would cost even more. Oh well, I figure I can just squeeze a few more years out of it now.

When I got in to take him home after his big ordeal, I really didn't have much of a problem readjusting to the new brakes as I had been driving a car with good brakes for over two weeks, but I kept over-steering everything, especially in parking lots.

Nothing happened.

Nothing.

Nothing.

We called Mommy for a jump. By the time she got there we had gotten it started and she followed us home.

Well, almost home.

The car quit working on Lincoln Street, almost in front the friend's house where the coolant hose exploded at. So we got towed back to my house, 6 blocks away.

To make a long story shorter, as I don't feel like being expository, the battery had died because the (daa-dada-daaaa!) ALTERNATOR died (sound familiar?). Turns out that when they replaced it the last time, the alternators for small Ford sedans had been updated, but they failed to give me the updated wiring pigtail. Luckily, I was on the last limb of my warranty and that saved me an extra $75.

So for my first assignment, two of the guys and I pulled the wheels off the U-R. This allowed me to learn why my wheels are all out of alignment: the front two don't match.

Yes, Bill strikes again, 3 different kinds of tires on a 4-wheeled vehicle. I could not believe it. Not only did the front not match the BACK, the front did not match the FRONT! And then when I told him about it, he had the testicular fortitude to contradict exactly everything I had learned in class that day by saying, "It doesn't really matter... just as long as the back ones are the same size and the front ones are the same size." Mommy and I just looked at each other and shook our heads. This man is never touching my car again.

Good thing it chose a Thursday to break because that's the day I have my auto class in the afternoon. So come about 1:30, my stepdad hauled my ass out there and I began to work on my 1990 Ford Tempo GL with a charming young man named Greg.

When we got the car lifted and took a look, we discovered several things. Yes, the brake line popped. Also, we learned that there is no metal under all of my seats. Some of the guys started poking the carpet with screwdrivers and claimed that I'd be "Flinstonin' it" by the middle of the summer. It's pretty hilarious, but now none of them will ever ride in it...

So, we managed to fix the brake line. Lots of bending and swearing and laughing at how much my car sucks. We saw that the other brake line would soon need replacing, and decided to do that at a later date.

When we finally got everything together, we bled the line (manually, although there is a bleed machine that the instructor said we shouldn't use for fear of busting the other line). Since Greg was in the brakes class, he tested it out by driving to parking lot and back. Something else, we figured on that 300-foot trip, was wrong now. So when we got it back in, we lifted it only to find that the other line had popped. We decided at that moment that it was time for a soda, considering that we had just wasted the entire class period fixing the other line.

To sum it up, we decided that he could fix it tomorrow, and if that didn't work that we would fix it on Monday. He was nice enough to give me a ride home in his little POS Ford, and his windshield wipers were being very random (that cheered us up a little bit). So I am probably Fordless all weekend now, and might have to walk to work tomorrow morning.