Car Care

Accident on Highway 26

I have spent in an inordinate amount of time dealing with my car this week. Sunday I let my wife use it because her's was out of gas. I like to buy gas at Costco 'cause it's cheaper, but I don't want to go to Costco on Sunday because it's going to be mobbed. Let's wait and go on Monday, but she has someplace to go on Sunday so I let her use my car.

She runs her errand but when she comes back she informs me that the tags have expired and I need to get it fixed. I bought the car back from my son a couple of months ago and never bothered to get the title transferred, so I guess maybe it's time. So off to the DMV to get the title transferred. That takes an hour and a hundred bucks, but I can't get the tags without a DEQ (smog) test. So off to the DEQ I go. That only takes half an hour and $25.

Thursday I head to downtown Portland for a lunch meeting. This usually takes about 30 minutes. Yesterday it took 2 hours. Highway 26 eastbound over Sylvan can get creepy-crawly, but yesterday was much worse. I considered bailing out early but I figured any alternate route is going to be jammed with people avoiding this SNAFU, so I creeped and crawled at less than walking speed for over an hour till we got within shouting distance of the top of the hill and then the congestion suddenly vanished and we all resume charging headlong into the future. At the last minute I realized that the cars at the top of the hill (just over a half mile away) all had their brake lights on. Traffic on the other side of the hill might just be getting into regular creepy-crawly mode (20 MPH), or it might be another cluster-muck, but in any case I had had enough so I bailed out. Took me another half hour to get downtown, but at least I wasn't stuck in a giant traffic jam. There never was any sign of what caused the problem, but the internet knows (picture at top).

Today it's time to tackle the tags again, so back to the DMV I go. Wait 10 minutes or so to find out I need proof of insurance. I have a couple of insurance cards in my wallet, but they're both expired, so back to the house to root around in my files and finally find a couple of current insurance cards. Back to the DMV. This time it takes two hours and $200 but I finally get it done.

Along the way I stopped at UBAD to get a loose rocker panel fixed. The car was a rebuilt wreck when I bought it and this spring the paint on the hood was starting to peal, so I spent a $1,000 and got it painted and the entire car detailed. I think the loose rocker panel is another casualty of the original wreck. Anyway it's trying to fall off, so I stop at UBAD and Martin puts a couple of screws in it. It's not pretty, but it works so it's good enough for me.

I also bought a tank of gas at Costco for $50 and a car wash for $10.

Hillsboro Industrial Park

Driving from DMV to DEQ I took some back roads, just to see what there is to see. Northwest of town farmers are plowing their fields with giant tractors. I thought you needed a giant farm to justify a giant tractors. Well, from the city limits to the coast range, it's all farmland, so yeah, maybe they do need giant tractors. My route eventually took me back inside The Urban Growth Boundary and what a change has happened to this area. There are a dozen, maybe two, big buildings that weren't there last week. The place is going crazy. You can see where The Urban Growth Boundary is in the above satellite map. I don't know how old that satellite image is, but I suspect it's at least a couple of weeks old, meaning it's missing half a dozen new buildings or so.

More car news. I sold my truck. Bought it roughly 30 months ago for $25,000 and spent $1,000 getting the damaged tailgate fixed. Decided I didn't really need a monster truck. Yes, it's a Colorado which is supposedly a compact, but it's a crew cab with a 6 foot bed, so it's very long which makes it kind of a pain to park just about anywhere. Now the Hyundai has returned to my warm embrace, so I don't really need it anymore. I stopped at CarMax in Beaverton. It took 30 minutes from them to come up with an offer of $13,000.

That was disappointing so I thought I'd try selling it myself and placed an ad on Craigslist. There is a little check box if you want to receive text messages and I thought, sure, why not? All the cool kids are doing in now, right? Wrong. I started getting texts right away, but every single one was from a scammer.  I had one guy ask for my best price. I was getting annoyed with all this noise, so I bumped the prince up another $1,000. He writes back immediately, saying okay and promising a certified check. That certified check business is sure sign of BSMF. After a month I finally got a phone call about the truck. This is the first person to call about it and he bought it for $15,000. So, waiting patiently paid me $2,000. I'll take that. He paid with a cashier's check, which is more like a money order. And it was good.

So the truck cost me $9,000 to own for 30 months. I probably only drove about 10,000 miles, so roughly a dollar a mile. Kind of high being as a car, over it's lifetime, probably costs more like 50 cents a mile.