So that's what Alanis was talking about.

(This not our car.)

One of the biggest stresses of this year has been purchasing, insuring, checking out, and now, selling, our car.

And the funny thing is, it's a great car! Festus (we named our car after Festus Mogae, president of Botswana from 1998 to 2008) has given us zero trouble, has been checked out and given a clean bill of health from a mechanic, and really all of the issues have come from external sources. First, the car dealers messed us around, then the insurance people took forever and kept raising their price.


On Friday, we were on our way to meet the person we're selling the car to, to initiate a bank transfer, and a Tropicana truck backed into us while the car was parked in front of the hospital. I'll try not to use the word "shitstorm" too many times from here on.

(And then Festus was granted three wishes and used one to become this car! But then he wished for more wishes and was disqualified.)

The damage isn't that bad, luckily. But it's bad enough that the hood needs to be banged back into shape and the lights need to be replaced.

First, we waited for over an hour for the police to arrive so we could file a police report, which took another hour and a visit to the police station. They also said they were going to fine the (pretty nice) guy who hit us, who as it turns out was at the hospital for a rather unfortunate medical reason, which then made us feel bad for getting the police report, which we now think we can't even use because we don't have time to file an insurance claim before we leave the country in two weeks.

Basically, after visiting four different car repair shops, we're resigned to paying $300 out of pocket to fix the car. But now, our buyer has decided to back out--he had taken a loan out for the full amount and the bank had charged him about $400 in fees, so he didn't have the money anymore. Since the car had been damaged, we had to return his deposit, and even though we offered, in our desperation to fix the damage AND sell the car to him for $400 less, he wouldn't budge, and actually went out and bought a different car later in the day.

So where does this leave us?

Now we have to get the car fixed as quickly as possible so we can show to any prospective buyers we might be lucky enough to stumble upon in the next like three days. If we can't sell it to an individual, we'll have to sell it to a used car dealership and potentially lose another $2000 or more.

All because this truck driver didn't use his mirrors and really just tapped us.

Needless to say, dealing with this is not how we want to spend our last two weeks here and have I mentioned we're hosting 12 people for Passover and I'm not sure how we will deal with not having a car this week?

I'm making a sacrifice to the irony gods asap.