zoom-boom

thanks for the support and advice yesterday. i know it’s hard to tell what with the once-a-day nature of the blog, but by the time i’d written about my bloo weekend, i was already on the mend. whee, hessie-coaster!
currently, i’m completely stressed about my car. three years after i quit, my car has now taken up the smoking habit. there’s some sort of oil leak and once the engine gets up to temperature and it’s stopped at a light or something, smoke puffs up from underneath the hood. isn’t that lovely? obviously, it’s going through a lot of oil what with the burning, so i opened up the lid to add some the other week and found an actual puddle of oil on top of the engine. a little divot was entirely filled with 10w30. yeah. great. i don’t know if it’s related to the three different gaskets/seals which were replaced in november, but whatever it is, i really just want to ignore it. so i am. if i remember correctly oil isn’t flammable in the traditional sense, so it’s not like the engine will burst into flame or anything.
of course, that’s not all which is wrong with my car. there’s this ominous *thunk* every time the vehicle mass shifts forward (think: braking or going downhill). i think it’s the rear strut. oh, and the rattling somewhere in the driver-side rear quarterpanel. and the fact i’ve lost 70km of mileage per tank since november. we can’t forget the muffler which muffles nothing and the high-pitched vibration which comes from the right rear quadrant when i accelerate to highway speeds after the on-ramp.
what gets my goat is that repairs to solve these problems will cost more than the car is worth and they’re all coming to a head right when i’m in the middle of grabbing my finances by the balls and declaring myself master of my money. i no longer have any credit cards and only so much cash on hand for unforseen expenditures. i’m not willing to blow my savings on the car. it’s ridiculous. so, my decision about getting rid of my vehicle may be taken completely out of my hands. which, now that i think about it, is actually kind of liberating.