So I’ve given in. I don’t think I mentioned on here, but we finally bought a modern car (lookie, a post at Transport Evolved, where I’m a staff writer now!). I’m planning to cut my hours at my main job to do a bit more agency work; with the theory being that we might be able to save a more significant sum of money up. I suspected that the Austin would probably not tolerate this very well, and moreover given that there’s less than 500 of them left, in total, it seemed a shame to throw that many miles onto it.
Not only that, but we saw this (which when the link dies is a small live/work shop in Port Townsend that we can actually afford to buy outright). It’s fracking tempting, and I have this sort of sensation that we really should just go for it, but also, we don’t want to end up in the US broke and with no health insurance. That way lies insanity.
On the other hand, if we owned somewhere outright our outgoings’d drop pretty dramatically.
But our house isn’t finished and so isn’t terribly sellable, so that kind of puts a crimp in that concept anyway.
Anyhow, as part of the process of selling the Austin off (which if anyone’s interested, I’m looking for around £1700) I’ve scrounged Nikki’s DA polisher, some paint restorer and some of her much-higher-quality-than-I-use-car polish. So I wandered outside this afternoon having completed my other exciting tasks for the day (go and get a polishing sleeve for the polisher; clean the steering wheel and switchgear and some other bits and bobs of the new car because they were hideously filthy it having been owned by a builder; spent several (quite a lot of) minutes trying (and failing) to persuade the Prius and the iPhone to talk / transfer contacts; organising Kathryn’s anniversary present…) and I gathered together the stuff to wash and polish the car.
I washed it and grabbed the cutting compound… it said ‘wash and dry the car’ so I waited whilst it dried, applied the cutting compound and followed the instructions which ended with allow to dry. Literally as I finished applying the last bit to the roof it started to rain.
I waited it out for a while, washing the Prius somewhat (which needs some cutting back in a few places too, being as a few places have paint transferred from other objects that the previous owner’s run into on them) before finally wiping off the worst of the cutting compound from the austin with the rain and heading inside. I really need to get it sold though because (a) I could do with some of the money back from the insurance and (b) It’s just sat cluttering up the street and (c) I could use the money back from the Austin to pay for some of the stuff that I had done to it to get it decently roadworthy. So I may have to have a look at it this weekend. Once it’s cleaned I need to tidy up the joint in the exhaust that I threw together when I was putting it on in a hurry (which is leaking), clean the inside and photograph the car. Then it should be good to go.
I’m hoping this will feel like progress because at the moment I’m feeling terribly frustrated. We’re hoping to try for baby-stuff again this month, which should also feel like progress; but having been on holiday the house feels very stalled; and we’ve neither of us made great progress on the planning of the grand adventure nor of the possibility of just dropping that and going to start our bookshop.
Feh, basically.
