Bought the car.
Towed the car.
Broke the car more.
Didn't fix anything.
Spent lots of money.
That was my day.
Okay, so I'm not just going to leave it at that....
How about pictures?!
Something that I might not have mentioned about Renney (Though for now we're calling her Nova. 'Cause 'No va' is Spanish for 'Doesn't go.'): She hasn't moved anywhere in about 5 years.
And yes. I bought this car.
I'm an idiot.
Moving on.
When the winch on the tow cable finally moved the tires from where they've been sitting for the past 8 years, we saw exactly how much stuff falls off of a tree in 8 years:
That would be the little divot that her wheel left in the dirt. Yeah.
So then we get it to D's house (D, for explaining, is Ll's father. Ll is the Friend of Awesome Car Knowledge), and I look at this car that I just bought, and I think to myself, "B, you just made A Very Bad Decision."
At this point, the car looked like this:
So then I'm panicking because it's not like I have a steady income, and I just bought a car that looks like that. It had lichen growing on it. And moss. I bought a fricking ROCK. My brain was like (_ _) and at this point I did the only thing that a girl who knows nothing about cars and was having a major internal freakout could do:
I grabed a bucket of water and a rag*. And I washed the car.
So Renney Nova is currently not running, but is very shiny.
While I was frantically scraping lichen off of my new car, Ll and D were trying to get the engine to turn over. The battery was completely shot (see previous comment regarding living under a tree for 8 years) so we went to the auto parts store and picked up it and some new blinker lightbulbs (at which point we discovered that the blinker light sockets were the real problem. Apparently the blinker light covers had filled with water and corroded them all to hell). After we put in the new battery, she really wanted to start but can't for some reason. It probably has something to do with old fuel and jetpacks or something else. Fuel injectors! That's what they're called. Not jetpacks.
Also, the hood release cable broke. Ll spent about 20 minutes trying to figure out how to open it from the outside with a wrench and then gave up. I opened it on my first try after he gave me the wrench. Maybe I'm actually better at this car fixin' stuff than I thought...
After we finished work for the day, we picked up S from work because we stole her car to get up to D's house, and then we stopped by the auto parts store and bought supplies for tomorrow (belts, hoses, light sockets, cake, transmission fluid, oil, candy-coated peanut butter pieces shaped like fish, glow plugs). While we were there, J, who works at the auto parts store, showed me the most magical thing I have ever seen: engine paint. PINK engine paint.
The pink engine paint became my Impulse Buy Of The Day. We also learned that vacuum line (I think it's called that...) comes in many colors and costs the same as regular vacuum line.
Yes. Yes indeed.
So after that, I gave Ll $40 to buy other parts that he may need while continuing work on it tomorrow (the rest will have to wait until I get paid on Sunday and cash my paycheck from a few weeks ago), bid farewell to Ll and S, and went home to curl up on the couch in migraine-ated pain for a few hours.
We'll see what tomorrow brings.
~B**
_____
*Okay, to be honest, I didn't grab a bucket of water and a rag. I grabbed my pack of Clorox wipes and went through 3 of them before D took pity on me and brought me a bucket of water and a rag.
**As you may have noticed, I refer to everyone by nifty initials in this blog. If you look around the internet, you'll probably find my real name fairly quickly. However, I'm still using codenames because 1) I have friends who don't want me putting their real name on the BLOG, 2) I like consistency, and most importantly, 3) Using code letters makes me feel like I am a secret agent.
