Anyone wanna buy a car?

The long process of finding and buying a new car now seems to be over. I bought a car on Monday. However, I have yet to receive it.

First, there were problems with the insurance. Since I had initially declined to add Albie to my insurance (he can't drive a stick-shift anyway), the car dealer refused to register the car for us now that Albie had to co-sign for it. Oh, I didn't tell you about that?

Well, the bank refused to give me a loan since I don't have an American driver's license yet (just the Connecticut ID, which is all that is required to register a car). Without this license, I am apparently very likely to escape back to Sweden. If I had said license, I would of course be bound to this country for life and would never, ever be able to skip out on my loan payments. Make sense?

No, not to me either. Anyway, calls were made, papers were signed, and a good time was had by all (as we like to say at the office).

However, my new car was nowhere to be found. Some guy from the service department had apparently scooted over to Beacon Falls to get the emissions testing done while we filled out papers. Turns out, since a new alternator for the car wasn't scheduled to arrive until Tuesday morning, and since that caused the battery light to blink on the dashboard, the test could not be completed.

So, after being two hours late for work Monday and spending three hours at the car dealer's, I still had no car.

I stopped by again today, wondering how I would be able to drive two cars home, but that problem was solved by the fact that my car still wasn't ready. The wrong part arrived, the engine needed to be reset, the mechanic took the car home overnight... I got all sorts of explanations.

In the meantime, I spent two hours detailing my old car - Windexing mirrors and windshields, vacuuming behind and under the seats and scraping leaves and pine needles off the engine. Someone is coming to look at my car tomorrow after I posted an ad on Craig's list. And this is what I had intended this blog post to be about.

Oh well. I am I'm hoping to drive my new car to work tomorrow. And it better have a full tank of gas.