farewell old friend

I would be referring to my Honda of course. Yes I finally got a new car on monday and picked it up on tuesday.. and damn was it stressful. So on monday I went to Thomas auto sales in Hillsboro and ended up driving a few cars around and picked one out. My new car is a 2000 Pontiac Grand Am GT and its great and I really like it so far. Its all black, has leather interior, has a nice 6 speaker stereo system including factory tweeters in the a pillars which is really cool, and I'm really impressed with the sound. The only gripe I have is the cd player has some issue most likely with the lense, because it skips the cd all over the place.. yet its not that big of a deal because I just bought a new cd/mp3/wma player a few months ago and I'm going to install it anyway. Another cool thing is the steering wheel has the stereo controls integrated into it.. but I'm not sure how or if thats going to work with my new deck, but then again it has a remote anyway so whatever. The car is in great shape.. and the only minor flaws I've seen are the few little rock chips on the hood.. but there aren't many. The paint is in awesome shape, yet when they waxed it last time they didn't get all the shit out of the cracks so I'm gonna do a complete work over in about a week or so. It has every option available when it came out as far as I can see, and the power moonroof is awesome. Its really fast too, its got the 3.4 liter v6 with Ram Air and has dual exhaust, 2 tips on each side too.. it has 175 hp I believe. Overall I'm really happy because its sporty and fast, plus its got plenty of room for passengers and cargo, and its got the leather interior, which also happens to be in great shape.. doesn't look like many people even sat in the back. From what I was told, it belonged to a business guy who drove back and forth to seattle all the time, so its mainly freeway miles which is nice.

Anyway, I did the deal on monday, but had to wait till tuesday because I had to bring in my honda as a trade.. which they actually gave me 1800 dollars for, haha. The thing is, I told them my car was starting to have engine problems and it wasn't in the best shape.. of course it wasn't that bad either and the inside has always been nice. The car had been sitting for a week and I was driving my sisters truck.. the reason behind that you can find in my last post. So I was really stressed because I had to drive the goddamn thing from my place over 20 miles to hillsboro.. and the car had a hard time even starting.. not to mention as I was driving it started leaking more oil and the smoke was coming through my vents and out my exhaust as I was driving up 26. I was fucking paranoid because I figured it would crap out on me any second.. and then when I got off the highway I had to go through shitloads of stop lights which fucking sucks since I have to throw it into neutral at each one and hold the gas down so it doesn't die. So when I got to the dealership I coasted in and rolled into a spot and it sputtered and died. So I got it there and was relieved but kind of nervous because they gave me a lot for the trade sight unseen and the car obviously isn't worth near 1800. It barely started when the guy was doing the trade in checklist. All I can say is whatever, because car dealers pull shit on people all the time and its not like I lied about the car sucking ass... so after that I finished the deal and drove the fuck outta there! I didn't even leave the stereo or speakers, haha.. hell I paid for all of that.

I've been through a lot with my old accord since I got it back in 98, it was my first and only car until now.. but it was its time, it was 18 yrs old and time was taking its toll on everything, hopefully they do something worthwhile with it, even if that means parting it out.

my car sucks

So I thought I'd make another post about my car sucking ass. I haven't been able to drive it for over a week now, and I had to make a trip to corvallis with my dad to pick up my sisters truck and have been driving it all week. I'm pissed because my parents helped me out when the original engine I had in my car blew up a couple years ago, and they paid for one of those crate engines to be shipped from japan and had it installed. Then engine probably had about 30 thousand miles on it, and I've put another 26 thousand or so miles on it in the past couple years, and I thought nothing of it. Anyway, the engine cost over a grand to ship and have installed and it only had a 6 month warranty on it which I wasn't too worried about because its a honda engine after all. Anyway, a few weeks ago it started acting up, whenever I'd come to a stop it would shut off so I was having to drive around and when I came to a stop I had to put it into neutral and keep my foot on the gas so it wouldn't die which was a real bitch I tell ya. So come to find out, its only running on 3 cylinders and one of my pistons is broken and I've also got a problem with oil coming up into my air cleaner and contaminating it with a pool of oil. So it fucking sucks because they say it could cost 2 to 4 times more than what I paid for my engine to get it fixed and obviously thats not worth it. I have went looking for cars a couple times already but wasn't set on what I wanted to do because 1. my credit isn't too great right now and 2. I wasn't sure how much I could really afford for payments and insurance together. I've decided after finding out from one place that they were going to finance me with an apr of 24%, that what I would do is get a car that costs about 5 grand or so, then after I pay on it for 6 months or so, build up my credit and then use the car as a trade in when I find a nicer car I'd like to have. So thats the plan right now, and tomorrow I'm gonna go look for a car and hopefully find one I like for that price. I hate car shopping and I hate when car salesman try to pull shit on people, and I have a very low tolerance for people who feed me bullshit.. and I've already experienced some of that, so hopefully I can get this shit done tomorrow and not become extremely annoyed in the process.

working my ass off

So for the past week I've been working a shitload of hours at work because there are a couple of new bonus programs in effect plus there is usually always unlimited OT. Now I haven't actually taken advantage of all of this because 1. work sucks, and 2. I didn't want to because work sucks. I have started to look at this from a different angle and am now using it to my advantage so I can make a lot more money. The way it works, besides the unlimited OT.. is that for every 2 hours I work over my scheduled shift, I get an extra $10 bucks, and also.. they have 4 hour blocks you can work and get an extra $15 for each one, but the thing about that one is the hours have to fall into a block of time you aren't normally scheduled. So basically this week I started off by working on one of my days off, Sunday the 16th for 5 hours because I got up late. This day also happened to be the first day of the pay period, then I took monday off to go car shopping, but came in tuesday worked 8 hrs, then on wednesday I worked 10 hrs, and on thursday and friday I worked 12 hrs each.. and finally this saturday I worked from opening to close (4 am - 9 pm) which was 16 grueling hours. I've never worked that many hours in a day before and needless to say it sucked. So far I have over 74 hrs for the week, about 35 being overtime hours because I worked today for 11 hrs which is my day off. So anyway, I should end up working another 88 hours or so because I'll be working 12 hr days until the 31st, and next saturday I'm gonna try to pull off another 16 hr shift, so we'll see if I do. Anyway, seeing as most of you probably don't care as much about this as I do, all I will say now is that all those hours plus the bonuses that will be attached to all those hours shall give me a nice chunk of change when I get paid on the 10th, which will kick ass because I'll be able to pay off everything I owe on, almost everything anyway, and I plan on working a buttload of hours for the next few weeks so the check afterwards will be big as well.. hell I'll probably stick a lot of it in a savings account for once! I'm excited for all this