so, mcat picked us up a jetta with the insurance money and a little extra he needed to use to buy it. it's actually a very good car - i think i like it better than the mystique. it definitely has a smoother ride, to me at least. course, the mystique was starting to have transmission problems. we've come to the conclusion that the accident was probably a good thing - at least we got something out of the mystique because of it. if we hadn't had the accident, the transmission would have died and we'd be stuck with a huge bill to fix it and no guarantees it would stay fixed. i remember when my mother had engine/transmission problems with her car and had to get stuff replaced. it never did run right after that and was constantly in a state of needing repair. so, mcat ended up paying a bit more for a car, but i think we were all saved in the long run.

anyway, the jetta is a dark green- kinda foresty. not my fave color, but one of the better greens and livable. it's one of those cars that you don't feel like you're not going fast when you are, which i like. there's plenty of room in it for us. not as much power stuff - no power locks or windows, but it does have a sun roof, which mcat apparently thought was really cool. it's a nice family car. runs well. no issues that we can find with it. even has a halfway decent radio.

jewel is happy that a car means she won't be running down to the grocery store every day. i'm just glad i'll be able to take care of things - the bank, for example. i'm the only one with access to my son's social security account, so i'm the one who has to get to the bank to put his money into our checking account for rent. without a car, this wasn't easy, to say the least. and emergencies are just plain impossible to deal with without a car. i think saxy will like not feeling like he's imposing on anyone to get a ride to work on the days he uses it.

new car meant a lot of running around, at least once i felt better. i've been pretty much sick all week. once again all that women's crap pretty much knocked me out for a week. this time i didn't actually catch anything with it (i usually get whatever cold is floating around the house), but i was so sick i couldn't eat much. i spent 2 days sleeping on and off, for the most part. the only good thing is it started the day after my birthday so, even though we didn't do much, at least i could enjoy it.

on saxy's birthday we went out to eat and picked up a few things, including groceries. i got my hair cut at last (4"!) so now i can look halfway respectable when i go in for any interview the school district may want. the next day saxy and i had lunch alone and i went to try to get my driver's license taken care of and they were closed. now i have to wait 2 more weeks since i ended up paying a huge chunk of our gas bill today and it pretty much wiped us out. that also means the girls' haircuts have to wait till next week as well. it's okay. little bits. we also picked up birthday presents, which was bad and not in the plans, but we'll be okay. saxy's hours and pay rate have picked up, so we're doing a little better right now. i just got to finish catching everything up for our living expenses. the grocery trip was kinda cool. big trunk. ;)

today there was no jetting for me. in fact, for a few hours, there wasn't even any power for me. lol saxy took the car to work on a job for mcat. while he was gone, our power went out for about 3 hours. apparently he kept trying to call and couldn't understand why we weren't answering. well, all our phones rely on electricity to work, so, no phone without power.

things feel like they're settling on something of an even keel, even if the finances are still a bit tangled. once i get a yay or nay on the dubbing job, i'll have a vehicle to manage everything i need either for that job or to hunt down another job - though i'd really rather have the subbing job work out. routines seem to settling in at home, though i hope to do a little breaking of my routines now that we have the car. if saxy leaves it here, i can go looking around, get out of the house once in awhile. but i know he'll probably need it for work when i'm not working, so that may not happen very often. once i am working and the worst of our debt is paid off, maybe we can look into a second car then.

silly how just a car can add a little hope to the situation, isn't it?