Fuck! My car!!

The short version: My car is fucking borked. I already poured nearly $600 into it for repairs when it broke, and as soon as I got it back it broke in a different way. We need to buy a new car. The great job that I had no longer fukken exists and stim checks are probably going to arrive at the same time my dog finishes her PhD, so here I am again.

I don't expect to raise the full amount, but my dream is to purchase a used vehicle that will last a few years and will not cost more than it is worth in repairs.

The Long Version: Hoo boy.

So 2021 has, so far, been a total shitshow. Good, steady, well paying job that I had abruptly stop being any of those things, my mental illness reared its ugly head, Dad and Seb have both been sick off and on, the big dog fight last November cost me $100 a week in vet bills for about two months straight, etc.

After several very serious depressive episodes I decided that the best thing for me was to spend a little bit of time in inpatient therapy, and started to make preparations to be sure that everybody at home would be safe and taken care of before I went. That included making a trip up to Michigan to the medical mj dispensary to get stuff to help treat Dad's TBI and Seb's anxiety. 

Usually it's a pretty good time; Seb comes with, we bring the dog, listen to music while we go. It's about a two hour round trip and Seb and I use the time to talk about whatever's going on in our lives. 

Twenty minutes into our drive while doing 70 on the highway, the car jerks and lurches to one side. I thought I'd hit a patch of ice and let off the gas until we reached a clearer stretch of roadway. But the car kept lurching and swerving, eventually to the point of fishtailing, and I pulled over to the shoulder because I was sure we had a flat. Instead, when I walked around to the back of the car, the left rear wheel was doing the stanky leg and sitting at a very non-okay angle. 

(just fyi, having something go wrong with the car while I'm driving at speed is one of my worst nightmares. I would like to congratulate myself for not just passing out onto the asphalt.)

I got back into the car and limped us down the next offramp, then parked us in a Burger King parking lot and messaged Dad to explain that aaaaaaaaaaaa. Then I caled for a tow, which I was informed would be $133 up front and would not arrive for several hours. I then called the only remaining cab company in Toledo and was told that a cab would also take several hours to arrive.

It was like 19 degrees out by the way. My dog Boo Boo was in the backseat growing increasingly concerned that we were no longer going bye-byes.

I eventually managed to find a lone Lyft driver who was willing to 1. Take us home, 2. Put Seb's wheelchair in the trunk and 3. Believe that Boo Boo was a service dog. Boo Boo did not throw up in this nice man's car and I gave him a very substantial tip.

It took a couple of days for the mechanic that I'd had the car towed to to take a look at my car, but by Monday he gave me a call and said a lot of words that ended in "probably a thousand dollars."

(something swaybar links, something pads and rotors, something hubs, something tie bar, something. I have the paperwork.)

I messaged a couple people to let them know that aaaaaaaaaaaaaa and after a few days I guess the mechanic got tired of looking at my vehicle and said that he could get it back on the road for $400, but that it would need more work afterwards. So I said okay, $400 it is.

(he redid the swaybar links and... one hub I think? It's too dark to look at the paperwork.)

I got the car back a week after it originally broke down; one week after I had planned to go into acute crisis care for my acute crisis. I asked someone in my local subreddit to help shovel out my driveway (since we'd gotten a foot of snow a couple days before) and he was also nice enough to drive me to the mechanic to pick up my car. I drove the car home and noticed... well, I figured I was being paranoid, considering what had happened last time.

The very next day, I put myself and my dog into the car once again, this time to run to the store to pick up dog food. I pulled out of my driveway, drove to the end of the block, made a left turn onto the main street and my car went CLUNK.

Then it started swerving all over the road again.

I turned the fuck around and drove home, put the car back in the driveway, came back inside and aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

Returning the car to the mechanic for further repairs would involve the cost of another tow, plus new brake pads and rotors front and back which costs $500 on their own, in addition to whatever else needs to be done to keep pieces of the vehicle from falling the fuck off while I'm driving it. That's not even touching the busted catalytic converter, the broken headlights, side mirror, windshield wipers and air conditioning, the oil leak, or the weird mysterious noises it makes all the time. 

So at this point we are just going to need a new car. As I said above in the short version, the IDEAL is to get a car that will be able to withstand the terrible hardship of me driving it like three times a week without chunks of it flying off, and in order to do that I'm going to have to get a car that costs more than one or two grand. 

In the pandemic, a lot of our doc appointments and such are online or over the phone, which is great. But there are still things that have to be done in person, like trips to the dentist or OBGYN, runs to the store for dog food (which walmart will not deliver, because it's too heavy-- they won't deliver things like lighters, either, because... reasons?), going to urgent care or the ER, or fuck, just taking Seb and the dog out for a drive because we're all cooped up in here. Again, there's only one cab service left in Toledo; Medicaid will pay for rides to scheduled appointments, but the service is notoriously unreliable, arriving hours late or sometimes not at all. 

Before COVID Seb had become very depressed because of his increasing lack of mobility and shrinking sense of independence, and we had started making a point to go somewhere a couple times a week like the library or the cafe just to get out of the house. In the last year sometimes I'd just take him out for a drive so he could look at something that wasn't indoors for once. 

We need a car. And since I've been rejected for selling plasma, here I am again.

tl;dr: 

Fuck.