Tag: cars

On being a grown-up

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

One of my students asked me today how much I hated paying taxes, and I think I slightly blew the kid’s mind when I told him that I don’t mind paying taxes at all, because I enjoy living in a society and paying taxes helps ensure that. He didn’t press for additional details, but had he done so I’d have pointed out that there were probably examples of specific taxes that I wouldn’t be especially fond of, or taxing systems that I had preferences on, but the concept of paying taxes itself? No, I’m fine with that, and there are any number of reasons why I might, in theory, advocate increasing my tax burden with no argument. In fact, having voted for a tax referendum for our local public school system in the last couple of years, I have already done that.

Anyway. This is leading toward a humblebrag, so brace yourself as necessary. My tire pressure sensors have been acting concerning lately, and I have three road trips planned in the next three days, so rather than adding air to my tires for the second time in eight days and crossing my fingers I decided to swing by the local tire shack and have someone take a closer look at them.

And that ended up costing me $650 for four new tires. And that’s after a visit to the comic shop, and buying myself dinner, and a visit to CVS for certain supplies that cost me $60, meaning that I left work and looked at my bank account and thought damn, I did pretty well keeping my spending down this week, and then dropped eight hundred dollars in a little over an hour and a half.

This is where the humblebrag comes in: for the first time in my life, I don’t mind the tires at all— to be honest, I wasn’t surprised when the diagnosis was “Well, you’ve got this giant screw in your tire here, so that’s the specific problem, but you’ve had this car since 2017. Have you ever put new tires on it?” I wasn’t certain that was what was going to happen, and I probably could have waited a few months if necessary, but I was able to look at a fairly substantial unplanned-for car expense and just shrug and pay for it because the money wasn’t going to kill me. Now, don’t get me wrong (he said, fending off the forces of karma), I don’t want any more unexpected $650 expenses anytime soon, but being able to just pay for that shit was nice.

The next couple of days are going to be busy– my wife’s aunt passed away and her funeral is in Michigan tomorrow, and then my nephew’s birthday party is in Chicago on Saturday, and we’re staying overnight for that so there’s a (shit!) hotel bill to pay for, but my classroom was a hundred and thirty degrees today so I’m happy to not be there for a couple of days. Hopefully Sunday will be relaxing enough by itself to get me through next week.

In which the magic almost happens

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy3 Comments

I have talked about my car a couple of times recently, so you may be aware that I drive a green Kia Soul. While I certainly didn’t mind the green, I bought the car used and the color was genuinely the least of my concerns; I like brightly-colored cars, which are less popular right now than they used to be, but the green Soul was inexplicably the most popular color and that was what was available, so that was what I got.

There is a name for the phenomenon I’m about to describe, and my former-psychology-major brain cannot quite produce it, but: you have no doubt noticed that once you, personally, own a certain kind of car you see that kind of car everywhere. And even knowing that, I was not quite prepared for just how many Alien Green Kia Souls there are on the road right now. In the years I’ve been driving the car I’ve been playing a little game with myself: how many Alien Green Kia Souls would I see at a given intersection at the same time? Would I ever actually pull up to a four-way stop and discover that there were Alien Green Kia Souls at all four of the stops?

Until today, my record was three of the four, and I genuinely thought I was never going to get past that. I mean … it’s a popular car, but that’s ridiculous, right?

Until today, when I almost achieved the unachievable. Because on the way home today I stopped at a four-way light, two lanes in every direction, and almost immediately noticed that I had tied my record– there were Alien Green Kia Souls both to my right and to my left. I looked at oncoming traffic, hoping to catch a glimpse of, perhaps, one in the distance approaching the intersection, so that I could count it before the lights changed and the two cars on the road I was crossing drove away.

And then it happened: a fourth Alien Green Kia Soul … pulled up in the lane next to me, driving the same direction I was.

Which I think counts as breaking the record, since this is in fact four cars at the same intersection for that brief moment until the other two started moving, but it does not in fact count for the magic situation I have been waiting for for so long, when there are four of us at each of the four cardinal directions.

And in my head, we always notice what has happened, and get out of our cars, and immediately become the best of friends.

But I guess now there are going to have to be five of us.

Achievement unlocked

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

If you have been around a while, you might remember me buying this car. At the time I took a 72-month loan on it, which I’ve been told is an unwise decision under nearly all circumstances, but whatever. 72 months from the purchase of the car would have been July of 2023.

It is currently March of 2022 and as of today my car is paid off. $237 a month back in my pocket. Awesome.

I am still waiting for my student loans to go away, which is likely to take a bit longer, but will still probably be done by the end of the school year. That’s another $545 a month. After that I pretty much just have the house and a personal loan to take care of (and “take care of” is a bit of an understatement, if I’m being honest, as they’re both pretty sizable amounts) but once those two are dealt with I will be debt-free, and getting rid of the car and the student loans will make an enormous difference, especially since I’ve been channeling every spare dime into paying for the car for the last six months or so and don’t have to do that any longer.

God help me, but that almost feels like cause for optimism. Time for the entire frame to fall off my car!

On cars and Hogwarts, again

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

If you’ve been around for a while, it’s possible that you remember this story: my son attends a pricey private school, one that my wife and I are affording with financial assistance. When we first started sending him there, I was driving a Ford Escape that had a six-figure mileage and was, itself, old enough to have a drivers’ license. My current Kia Soul is an upgrade. However, there was a day, several years ago, when I was picking my son up during the winter in the Escape and experiencing a bit of class anxiety. I comforted myself with the existence of what looked like a station wagon in the parking spot next to me that also was covered in salt and muddy snow and looked kind of shitty, only to discover that I was comparing my $2000 Escape to a fucking $100,000 Porsche.

He’s at summer camp right now, and I just went to pick him up, and I found myself in the car line behind a Tesla– I don’t know exactly which model, but not the one with the weird doors. One kid got in that car and they stayed in their spot, possibly waiting for another kid. My kid came out and got in my car, so I waited for the lane to be clear and pulled out to drive around the Tesla that had been parked in front of me.

Only to find myself behind another fucking Tesla.

My wife and I do just fine, I swear, and I see the effects of actual poverty every day at work, and again, no one in this building has ever been anything other than perfectly nice, but damn, there is just no faster way to make myself feel broke than to look around at the cars any time I’m near Hogwarts. It’s ridiculous.

I suspect we’re going to be back up over 100,000 new cases a day nationwide by the end of the week, (EDIT: Ha, it happened today!) and the CDC just announced that everybody should start masking up indoors again. I just ordered a new pack of filters for my favored mask. I was really hoping to not have to teach in a mask again this year, but apparently only about 20% of 12-15-year-olds are vaccinated nationwide and I’m sure that number is lower in my district, so I really don’t have any choice. Indiana’s numbers are going up, but they aren’t spiking to the degree the nation’s are yet and St. Joe County isn’t as hot as the rest of Indiana, so I’m pretty sure the school year will be starting as normal this year. That said, I don’t think I knew on July 27 last summer how this year would be starting yet, so who the hell knows? I suspect everyone will just close their eyes and pretend Covid has gone away, but we’ll see.

LOUISVILLE: View from my car window

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

Guess whose car got broken into last night? And has to listen to this for four hours on Sunday?

(Coulda been a lot worse. They took a pair of prescription sunglasses. That’s it. Didn’t touch any of my con stuff and the car didn’t flood in the rain.)

Meet Joey Car James

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography3 Comments

Joey here will be conveying us around for the next several days.

Speaking of milestones

On By Luther M. SilerIn life, Photography4 Comments

I give you Joey Car Kristofferson II Green.

So, my car

On By Luther M. SilerIn life3 Comments

Screen Shot 2017-05-25 at 5.02.01 PMI done fucked up today, I think.

My current car is a 2001 Ford Escape with nearly a hundred and seventy thousand miles on it.  The fabric on the driver’s side door is mostly peeled off, there are big patches of rust inside all the doors, and there’s a big crack in the rear bumper.  The radio intermittently decides it needs to take a rest and won’t turn back on for anywhere from a few seconds to a day.  It leaks oil from a leak so deep in the engine that repairing it is an absurdity.  And its gas mileage… well, leaves something to be desired.

That said: it turns on when I need it to turn on and it gets me where I want to go, and while it’s loud as hell at speed it’s not an uncomfortable ride by any means.  It’s just that at 170K it is only a matter of time until something breaks that will be pointless to repair.  To get ahead of myself a bit, I was offered $1200 for it as a trade today and I think it was probably a pretty generous offer, all told.

The boy has named the car Joey Car Kristofferson.  I will very much miss having a car named Joey Car Kristofferson, to the point where I will probably insist that its replacement be named Joey Car Kristofferson II.  (My wife’s car, incidentally, is called Lisa Car James.  Don’t ask where the boy got the names.  No one knows.)

So anyway, I took that car up there for a test drive earlier today.  It’s a 2016 Kia Soul in the + trim level, with 28,000 miles on it.  It’s immaculately clean and seems to run beautifully.  It’s small– trunk space, in particular, is kind of a joke– but it fits my main need in a vehicle, which is that it rides high enough that I climb into the seat and slide out, rather than the other way around.  I refuse to struggle to get out of my car, which means I’ll never own a sedan again.  I’ve started to seriously hate them.  I test drove a brand-new Ford Escape a few months ago, and loved it, but financially I think it’s a better idea to go for a lightly used vehicle right now rather than a new one.  Unless I lease, which I might choose to do but <insert every website and argument about leasing ever> and my brain isn’t set up for that right now.

It’s just under fifteen thousand bucks, that car, and with the financing I’d expect to get I’d probably be making payments of just over $200 a month.  Which is in the neighborhood where I’m thinking Yeah, I can swing that rather than I can afford that.  To my mind, that’s a real difference; you can swing a new purchase if you can come up with some ways to cut costs that would absorb a lot of the new bill and figure you’ll be okay.  You can afford something if you don’t have to think at all about what you’ll do to pay for it.  For example, I can afford to spend $25-50 pretty much whenever I want so long as I don’t, like, do it every day.  But if I want to buy a new shirt or something?  I don’t have to think about that.  A car payment means I’m thinking things like well, I do eat out way too often anyway and I’m spending too much fucking money on comic books every week while I’m considering what it would do to my budget.  And the down payment would have to come out of our mutual savings, which my wife will likely have something to say about.  We did just drop three and a half grand on a new bed, after all.

I’m not sure I have a point here, and I don’t know if I’m asking for advice or just talking.  I just need to decide how quickly I think I need a new car, and whether I should buy a new one before I need a new one.

Go buy some of my books and make this easier, dammit.  🙂