What Better Time to Learn?

I feel like I do a pretty go job with having manly hobbies.  Whittling? Check.  Camping?  Check.  Football?  Check.  Bear wrestling?  Double Check.  The one area I feel my manly skills are lacking is with cars.  I don’t really know anything about cars.  Well, I didn’t.  But, I decided to do something about it!  Roni and I are both in the last year of our academic programs, and we no longer have the ability to schedule around each other’s classes.  This created a bit of a problem.  I needed the car for work, and Roni needed the car to get to class.  If we lived somewhere without snow, I would just ride by bike to work and school.  However, I have little interest in riding my bike to work and school when the roads are slick with ice.  It looked like we were about to become a two-car family.

Well, as students (as I am sure you can remember), we didn’t have a lot of money to put towards a car.  We did a little bit of number crunching, and determined that we could spend no more than $1,000 on a car.  We figured that it really only needed to run until April, at which point we would graduate and move on to better things.

Not surprisingly, you can’t really get much for $1,000.  But in the midst ads like “Im seln mai 2004 kia.  It rnz RL Gr8, butt needz wrk bc I took out teh enjin and tranny and it dunt werk”  I would see a glimmer of hope.  I saw several ads for older Nissan/Datsun cars.  Admittedly, I have a soft spot for Datsuns because my very first car was a ’83 Datsun Sentra that had something like 250,000 miles on it.  I figured that older cars were mechanically simpler to work on, and that an older car would be a great chance for me to learn the ins and outs of how cars work.

After a few weeks, I found the car.  It was an old 1981 Datsun 280zx.  The seller assured me that the car ran great, except that it needed a new fuel pump.  I drove down to Nephi and took the car for a test drive.  The car only had 90,000 miles on it thanks to sitting in somebody’s yard for 15 years.  During the test drive, the car ran pretty well.  I wanted it.  I convinced myself I needed it.  I made a partial payment, with the rest due once they delivered the car.  The next day when I came home from work, I was greeted by this:

This makes me happy.

To be continued . . .