Luke Plays Minestorm
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGg3vCuxQ9I]
Downtime
It feels kinda weird, yesterday and today not doing much productive around the house. I suppose there’s a few things I could busy myself with, like organizing the garage, or getting the old server stuff migrated over to some new hardware. Nothing critical though, and instead I’ve spent my time watering the grass and playing Minecraft.
There’s a lot of work that needs done, but it’s all in a holding pattern right now. The Cutlass is at the transmission shop right now getting rebuilt. The Jeep needs to be looked at next. The Toronado is ready for ball joints, but I only have half of them, the other half should come in tomorrow. Don’t get me started on the long list of stuff the Black Car needs. The Toro obviously has kinda just been sitting there a while, but the Jeep and Cutlass both kinda all happened at the same time. It’s a giant sucking sound to the bank account… but oh well. Just a setback, nothing more. Small potatoes in the grand scheme of what’s important in life.
So I sorta feel like I’m procrastinating if I kick back and game a bit. But in reality, I couldn’t get much done right now in the automotive realm if I wanted to. So the only real procrastinating I’m doing is by NOT gaming. I keep talking all the time about how I don’t have as much time to play games as I would like to, so if I don’t take advantage of that now, I’m being a bit hypocritical.
So I’m off to play some more FFX-HD. What a fantastic game. This is probably my 4th playthrough of the game and it’s totally time well spent. Even with the backlog I have piling up. Oh yeah. I need to update my Backloggery. Welp, add that to the list!
I leave you with this video of Luke playing Duck Hunt for the first time. =)
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkPUc3S3EsU]
The Problem With the Jeep
This has definitely been the most high maintenance vehicle I’ve ever owned. Seems like there’s always something up. Sometimes little things, sometimes big things. Even so, it’s not a difficult, nor expensive vehicle to work on. Everything that has come up we’ve handled fairly easily.
But now it’s looking like the engine… and maybe even the transmission are about done for. All said and done it would be around $6,000 to $7,000 to rebuild both of them.
So the crossroads we find ourselves at is this… we have enough money to replace the Jeep. That being, the Jeep when running is worth about $3,500. We could go buy another $3,500 vehicle. But who knows what kind of work that will need, could be flawless (not likely) or it could be about to blow just like the one we have. That’s a big gamble.
We’ve been looking around at vehicles in the $5,000 to $6,000 range and there’s a lot of crap out there! 150,000 to 250,000 miles with paint that’s all scratched up, interiors that are worn out. There’s some decent “Grandma cars”, but Andrea flatly refuses to drive anything like that. I guess I kinda understand. You have to at least like what you’re driving or else you aren’t motivated to take care of it.
Or for $6,000 we get a brand new engine and transmission that has no miles on it at all, comes with a 3 year warranty and should be good for 100,000 miles if we take care of it, like we certainly would.
If we didn’t like driving it, it wouldn’t even be an issue. But it’s comfortable, roomy, and it looks good! Plus we just spent $1,000 on tires 6 months ago.
If we do this though, it pretty much guarantees we can’t sell it… ever. It just wouldn’t be worth it. Even after dumping $6k into it, it’s still a $3k vehicle to the rest of the world.
Sucks to be in this situation, but I always try to think about how we can come out better than before it happened. Going to keep thinking and praying on it for now.