i've had my new civic for 5-6 weeks now, & yes, i still love it. i've already taken it out of town 2x, with wonderful results. the little things are what please me the most: i can even take pleasure in drive-throughs now. i could never go through a drive-thru in kaput!; that car hated idling. by the time i would pull up to the window, kaput! would be busily billowing fragrant plumes of smoke, burning oil as fast as i could add it. & because drive-thrus typically have that little roof to block out rain (who wants to get wet when you reach out to grab your food?), the smoke would accumulate in a convenient toxic cloud all around me. burning motor oil is just the thing to build up hunger for a hamburger.

yes, i've had the new car since early/mid february. because my name is alphabetically early, my license plates expire in february. it's now the end of march, my plates have been expired for a month, & i still don't have my new vehicle registration info.

i was originally told that i could just keep my old metal plates on the car, & then when i got the registration paperwork i could just get a new sticker for them instead of all-new plates. but as the end of february rolled around, i was forced to go into the honda dealership to get new temporary plates.

that honda dealership was one of the most poorly-designed places i'd ever been to. it was in one of the busiest intersections in town (keystone & 96th). not only that, but the parking lots were cramped & one-way. once you pull into a space in the visitor lot (facing away from the street), there is no place to turn around to get facing toward the exit again. the first time i took the car in there (to get the cd player installed; i didn't find out until i was getting it back that they didn't have an ashtray to install yet), i literally had to pull out of the parking lot in reverse. it took ten minutes to perform & took a good month off my life from the sheer terror of manuevering in tiny spaces in reverse in a car i wasn't yet familiar with driving. somehow i survived without hitting anything. the second time i took it in (to get the new temp plates, & to get the ashtray installed) i lucked out & they left it parked in the back lot, so i didn't have to reverse anywhere. the dealership has since moved to a much nicer larger location, so i'll never have to visit that traffic travesty again.

but i will have to go into the new dealership very very soon.

you may recall that i bought the car at an auto show at the state fairgrounds. it was not a bad thing, but it lacked some of the amenities of even the old claustrophobic dealership. i'd forgotten to bring kaput!'s registration info when we went to the fairgrounds to pick up the car, so this month when we were trying to sort out what was holding up my new registration info, i had to fax that in. faxing is not a part of my everyday job, so i was not too familiar with the fax machine here. eventually i got it to work, but that turned out to be right when the dealership moved at the beginning of this month. so they had a new fax number, & i had to fax the paper in yet again, only to a different number. afterward i never heard back that the info hadn't gone through, so i assumed everything was copacetic & that i'd get my registration packet soon. 3 weeks later, it still hadn't come.

when i called in asking about that, it was discovered that the dealership had never "received payment" of my down payment. i'd given them a credit card (actually my debit card), but they didn't have a credit card machine at the fairgrounds, so i was told then that they would process the transaction later. it turns out that never happened. so more than a month later, they still didn't have my down payment, & i still didn't have my registration paperwork. my sales rep even commented to me "i don't know how they sell so many cars."

so i gave him my card number once again, & hopefully that means now the transaction will go through. but they almost certainly won't be able to get my paperwork to me before month's end, which means i'll need to go get a brand new temporary plate for the month of april. aren't there laws about how long you can drive around with paper plates? it seems like there would be. i guess i don't really care that much, because it's easier to drive to the dealer & get a new plate than to wait in line for weeks at the bmv. but i've had 2 different license plates on my car for a month now, & it would be nice simply not to have to worry about it anymore. don't you think? because i still have to go to the bmv someday. no matter how much the dealership screws up & delays that, they can't keep delaying it forever. sooner or later the government will catch on. if i get pulled over a year from now & still have a temp plate on my car, i don't see the police being too understanding.

then again, these problems are nothing compared to the dread of driving kaput! around each day. the engine starts when i want it to. the oil stays inside the engine, in liquid form no less. when i depress the brake, the car actually slows down. like i said, it's the little things. so even with all these paperwork headaches, i have no regrets. well, none relating to the car, anyway.