"Well, unless Ralph is willing to buy me a new car, I'm going to have to stick with this one until the wheels fall off."

Ah, my car. Shortly before I left for San Diego (actually, the Friday before Labor Day to be exact) my car went from sounding like a regular car to sounding like a damn tank. Of course, I have NO CLUE about cars so I didn't know what the hell was the matter with it. I looked at the muffler (a baby's 'looked at' not a mechanic's) and didn't seem to find anything wrong with it. I didn't think much about it because I wasn't going to need to use it Labor Day weekend and then after that I'd be gone for 10 days. I'd take it to Midas once I got back home and settled.

I met Court at Midas yesterday afternoon and we dropped it off and then I took her back to work and went home. An hour went by and the guy from Midas called. There was a cracked pipe coming out of the catalytic convertor...a new CC would cost $600 he said. Then, he said, we can replace the pipe with a flex-hose and make it as good as new. He said Ford makes the cc that way so you have to replace the whole thing if even only the pipe is cracked. Mechanics have come up with a work-around of using this flex-hose that'd make it just as good as the factory would. The price of that...$150. I chose that route. :)

One thing I like about our Midas is, there've been two times when I took my car there with something *definitely* wrong with it. Once, it was dying every once in a while and I took it there and they fixed the spark plug firing or something and that problem went away forever. The second time is this last time. Both times it cost me less than $200 (the level where fixing a car stops being a screw-job and becomes a minor inconvenience, to me anyway) and both times the car ran perfectly afterwards.

I hate taking a car in for some problem only to have it run (seemingly) the same damn way it had been running and have it cost me hundreds of dollars. (see recent Boots vet visit) With this fix the noise level produced by my car decreased 800%, so it was well worth it.

My car costs us nothing and I hardly use it so it's a perfect situation. There's definitely a level where if the fix had cost a certain amount (maybe say, over $500) that I would have said 'screw it' and either gotten a new car or gone without. I'm glad that didn't happen.