I've been watching a lot of The Price Is Right the past two weeks, as evidenced by the title of this post. So I was going to do this post about 6 months ago, but now it's going to be even better. Here's the timeline:
May 1997: Turn 16 years old.
January 1998: Get the 1990 Honda-who-was-never-named for driving to high school.

September 1998: Take picture with Old Honda on some homecoming theme day where we were apparently allowed to dress up as the '50s, but still had to wear our uniforms.
August 1999: Go to college and leave Old Honda at home for the family to use.
July 2000: Brother turns 16 and starts driving Old Honda
May 2001: Next semester of college I would be driving to elementary schools for classes, so I really needed a car. The parents used the money my great-grandmother had given me when I was born to buy Rhonda the Honda - the 1994 edition. I loved that girl!
December 2005: We bought The X, which became Jon's car while I drove Rhonda.

September 2008: Rhonda had some issues at the ripe old age of 14, but was still holding out for me. Jon's parents ever so graciously GAVE us their Buick, as they were purchasing a minivan for transporting present and future grandchildren. They also wanted us to be able to sell Rhonda to help us get the down payment for our house and have a safer car with their grandbaby who on the way. Thanks Sumnerses!

Hugging Rhonda bye on the last night she was mine.

Bertha the Buick hanging out in the driveway in the snow.

December 2008: The Wreck We were down to just Bertha, but Jon's parents again ever-so-kindly let us borrow their other Buick until we were able to get a new car to replace The X. That ended up being three months! Thanks again Sumnerses!

Yesterday: We got a new car! It's a 2006 Buick Rendezvous and I love it! It will be Jake's and my transportation for many years to come. It has a ton of storage space, a huge area in back for stroller, groceries, junk, etc. and has this cool feature where the radio gets louder when you speed up to get on the freeway and softer when you slow back down. Yay new car!

Gig 'em new car! (She doesn't have a name yet.)

Hugging the new car hello.
And look! It even came with a Jesus fish. Yay for saving $4 buying a new one!

Posted in: awesomeness, car troubles on Wednesday, March 25, 2009 at at 12:51 PM 4 comments    

Neither of us had to work today because all of the schools in the area were closed! Yay! But I had my 28 week appointment at the doctor. Jon offered to drive me since it was icy out and the roads were dangerous. We went to the appointment, then went to Target and by the library (which was closed because of the weather.) We were on our way back home and driving down I-30. There were small patches of ice along the way, but nothing major except along the edges of the bridges where nobody drove.
Well, our left tires got on some of that ice on one of those bridges and we started to swerve. Jon tried to get out of the swerve, but we hit the retaining wall, which sent us spinning. We then spun back into the road, hitting the side of an 18-wheeler, which sent us spinning again, and the guy behind us hit us. Somehow with all of this spinning and hitting, we were only damaged on the front end.
My head hurt for a little while because I grabbed that handle up over my window and hit my head on my thumb joint - you know, that hard one where your thumb connects to your hand. Jon got a burn on his right thumb from the airbag. It's still bothering him pretty badly and he's treating it with cold packs, tylenol, and aloe. I called my doctor to see if I needed to come in since I hadn't had any trauma to the belly. (Neither of us even hit the airbags - guess the seatbelts worked!) The doctor said that as long as I was still feeling the baby move (which I am) and wasn't experiencing any severe cramping or bleeding (which I'm not), I was alright.
God really protected us and we came out really well in several different areas. Everyone was driving slowly because of the ice and the traffic was really spaced out so there wasn't a chain reaction or anything. We didn't get a ticket for the accident, I'm guessing because it was caused by ice. We already got the reimbursement check for the towing ($245!!!) and the insurance said that our insurance should only go up around $40 per 6 months because of the cancelation of the Good Driver Discount or whatever it's called.
My camera batteries were almost completely dead, so I just got a short video of the front of the car. (For some reason, it takes less battery power to make a video than take a picture.) Here it is:

Posted in: car troubles, oops, video on Tuesday, December 16, 2008 at at 8:53 PM 6 comments    

Thursday afternoon my back right tire was really low on air, so my boss man, who happens to own an air compressor, inflated my tire. I just figured it had gotten low since it hadn't been inflated in three months. It seems it was the same problem that I had with my last two flat tires. Luckily my last two flat tires happened while my car was sitting in the parking lot at our apartment in Texarkana and in the parking lot at my school in Texarkana. Not so with this one. I was driving 65mph on 630 in Little Rock. And my tire committed suicide. I had my windows open while driving to save gas on air conditioning and heard a really loud noise. I thought it might be my tire, but then I thought it was the car next to me. I slowed down a little to see if it got louder when they passed me, but no, my car then started to shake. Well, gotta get over to the right lane. At that particular place there was actually no shoulder, so I had keep driving just a little further until the shoulder appeared.
Thanks to the designers of the freeway, the very narrow shoulder goes right up against a hill up to the street there, so there was NO room. I climbed over and got out of the passenger side. I called Jon, who was way out in Egypt at his school working on his classroom, but could be there in 20 minutes. I called my sister-in-law to see where her husband was, but he was out at their house, just as far away. She called my father-in-law, who happened to be on his way home from work and would pass by in about 10 minutes.
At this point I started unloading my COMPLETELY FULL trunk into the backseat of my car to get to the spare tire. (I keep a bunch of education stuff in there for the boys.) A few minutes later, BUD, some guy, pulled up and jumped out of his truck. "Please don't murder me." I told him it was ok - that my father-in-law was coming in a few minutes, and he said he could have it fixed before he got there. "Please don't murder me." He grabbed stuff out of the back of his truck and I continued to unload the trunk. Just as he finished fixing it, my father-in-law pulled up behind us. Bud said, "Told you I could fix it before he got here!" And he drove off. "Bye! Thanks for not murdering me!"

Posted in: car troubles, oops on Saturday, June 28, 2008 at at 12:24 PM 0 comments    

Over the past two weeks the fan blowing the heat and air in my car has been going out. It wouldn't come on when I started the car, but once I started going it would eventually start up. It finally called it quits around Thursday. My brother-in-law-in-law (Jon's sister's husband) has been known to fix cars before. He sees it as a challenge to figure out what's wrong and make it right. The motor that makes the window go up on Jon's mom's car went out and Wes went to the local salvage yard, picked it up for $30 and repaired it himself. That would have been $600 just for the part if she'd taken it to a repair shop. So I thought I'd ask him first.
He found the problem was that the "heater fan motor" had gone out. He pulled it out and we went on a field trip...
...to the U-Pull-It. It's just rows and rows of old cars that you can just go in with your tools and pull out whatever parts you need, take it up to the front, give them the money and go. It's all really weird and kind of creepy. We found one car that was the model before mine but it was really hard to get the fan out and he wanted to try to find a newer one so that the fan wouldn't be as used. So we went down a few more rows and found one 3 years newer than mine.

Here he is digging in under this already-very-torn-apart-car's dashboard to get the new fan.

This is the beauty that my fan came out of. And Wes peeking out.

I then realized we could look around for a new H. My H had fallen off/was stolen off the back of my Honda last year. It was just gone one day. Funny thing is that almost every Honda there was already missing its H. Eventually we found one and popped it off for me to replace mine. We took the motor and the H up to the front and it was only $20. We took it back to the house and Wes replaced it. He loves my chocolate chip cookies, so that's how I'm going to repay him for doing that whole thing in about 2 hours, me not having to give up my car for a day, and not having to pay a repair shop WAY more than $20 for the work done. Thanks, Wes.

Posted in: car troubles, cheapness, creepy things on Sunday, March 09, 2008 at at 11:23 PM 0 comments    

I'm a good driver. I've never caused an accident and have never been pulled over. Every little dent and scratch on my 1994 Honda Accord is due to other people being too close to me in a parking lot or something. Until today. I've never been good at judging the distance to the curb when parking my car. This is an old picture of my car...

Notice that there is a black piece of plastic under the front left side, but not the front right side. This is due to the fact that I repeatedly ran the front of the car into curbs, eventually knocking that whole side loose and it ripping off about a year and a half ago. That was lovely.
Well today I was taking D to the park and pulled up a little too far once again. It hit the curb and I backed up, but I heard a new horrible sound that I'd never heard when backing off the curb before. The looks on the faces of the people sitting on the bench at the park weren't too promising either. When I got out of the car, this is what I saw...





The curb grabbed the lip under my car and just pulled the whole thing forward, breaking the little plastic pieces on either side that were attaching it to the part above it. Apparently this depth perception error is going to cost quite a lot because apparently that whole bottom piece of the car will need to be replaced. I'm going to start backing into parking spots.

Update: I took my car to Car Repair Guy this morning and he said he can fix it for about $100! Yay! That's better than a lot of bigger numbers.

Posted in: car troubles, oops on Monday, February 04, 2008 at at 11:30 PM 3 comments