parting with the Prizm

It's official: the car is a total loss. :( Don't those two words sound horrible? And the poor thing never had any problems, was never in any kind of accident, until last week's fender bender. There was nothing wrong with anything under the hood. A cracked front rail (the replacement of which would cost more than the worth of the whole car) was the ultimate cause of its demise.

I'm a little sad to see the Prizm go. It was my very first car. My dad had always promised me that if I earned a full scholarship to college and got good grades the first year, he'd buy me a car. I kept my end of the bargain, and he surprised me with a set of keys in July 1998. The car was used and a year old, but it only had 21,000 miles on it. I called it "The Stealth" because it was black. George took over as the Prizm's primary driver when I leased a new Honda Civic in 2001 (right after I graduated college), and we planned on keeping it until it didn't run anymore. That's the reason my dad picked it out in the first place: it was safe, it was reliable, and it would last long enough so that I wouldn't have to buy another car until I was 30. Unfortunately, the weather here in Ohio did not cooperate with our plan.

We have a meeting with our insurance company on Friday morning to sign over the title. Thankfully, they're giving us the book value of the car, which is over twice the amount we anticipated. And if we buy another car within 30 days, they'll also pay the sales tax on that (which in Ohio is 6.75%). A pretty fair deal overall. It could be worse.

The only problem is that George and I work in cities an hour apart and we NEED two cars. He only gets a rental car through Friday, and I doubt we'll find another car that quickly, so we'll probably have to rent a car somewhere until we buy one.

So much for our extra money.