Look up!

I now have a car with a sunroof.

It’s actually designed to have a sunroof, even.  It’s not as if I went down to my local firehouse and borrowed a Hurst tool and carved one myself – it’s an actual, intentionally placed sunroof.  Lauren thinks this is the coolest thing she’s run into today, and she may well be right considering that she spent half the day at middle school and much of the rest hanging around with me.  That’s not much competition, to be honest.

Of course, next week I will have to give the car back to the repair shop, and that is fine by me.  It’s only been twelve hours but I miss my own car.

I’ve been riding around Wisconsin with the remains of my left tail light hanging out, essentially useless, since last week’s fender-bender, waiting for some patrolman to pull me over for it.  But apparently they have better things to do, which is a good sign as far as I am concerned, and they let me slide.  That and the fact that it is apparently uncool to use turn signals in 21st-century America so nobody even noticed that mine was not working.  It's just sort of assumed these days.  Sometimes I use my turn signals just to make people wonder if I really mean it.  And then - surprise! - I actually turn.  They always look perplexed, like I've broken some kind of code.  I am a rebel.  Hear me roar. 

But today I finally turned the car in for repairs, because seriously not having a turn signal gets kind of old.

I'm going to have this car for a while.  Considering the fact that neither vehicle involved in last week’s accident was traveling more than 10 miles per hour – and both were quite possibly traveling significantly slower – it is astonishing to me how much repair work is needed.  “Oh, yeah,” the guy said.  “At least six days.  Maybe seven.”

They did give me the loaner car for the interval, which was nice of them.  It is the most stripped down Ford Taurus ever sold.  Manual locks!  Manual everything (except transmission)!  It’s like being back in the 90s!  I’m actually enjoying it, in an old-school sort of way.

Plus it has the sunroof, which I did not know about until Lauren figured it out on the way home from school.

The real problem with the car is that it rides about four inches above the asphalt.  This might have been cool at some point in my life but a) this is a Ford Taurus, which instantly negates any motion toward cool that might be made, b) I’m driving it, which only further negates any such motion, and c) I’m old and having to climb up out of a vehicle is no longer charming.  It should have a step ladder, is what I’m saying.  Or an ejector seat.

Maybe that's what the sunroof is for?

Tabitha and I are going to take it out driving sometime later this week, because it will be good for her to get practice on something other than our own cars – that driving test is coming up at some point, after all. 

I’ll be glad to get my little red car back, though.