No Kids, No Life, Just a Wife

I've been tagged by Carissa to tell you folks about my first car. Let me tell you I cringe when I think of that thing, but when I got it? OOOOOoooo! Momma! I was a happy girl. I thought I was hot shit in that thing, yes, you can laugh at that. My very first car was a Vintage 1987 Chrysler Le Baron 4 door, 2.2 non turbo, Poop Brown with a lovely Maroon interior that I paid $1,000 for. This car came with an amazing set of problems. When I got it I knew it had a vacuum leak which caused it to tach out at 6,000 rpm's when you started it before dropping back down to a normal idle level. Not such a terrible problem except we could never find the leak, so every time I started my car it sounded like it might blow the fuck up unless I threw it into drive as soon as I started it. Which I did fairly often (because OMG! SO EMBARRASSING!), which, in case you're wondering, is NOT GOOD for the car. It didn't matter, I totally hearted this car in all it's Poop Browniness because it's Mine! MIIIIINE! The following winter the next problem showed up. No Heat. At All. Where I lived at the time was part of the snow belt in PA and most mornings it was many many degrees in the negative. No dipstick heater or magnetic oil pan heater in the world could make this car want to start. So on the days I could get my car to start I drove to work with many many blankets shivering all the way. At the time I was working for a dealership and I had a mechanic take a look at the car for me because No heat? Not OK. He took it out for a test drive and blew a giant hole in my radiator. Why you ask? Well because the previous owner or place where I bought this hunk of shit put sawdust in the radiator, which was the cause of my no heat problem. Would you like to know WHY they might put sawdust in my radiator? Well, let me tell ya. It's an old folk remedy for a leaky radiator the draw back to this remedy is that it plugs up the rest of the system, therefore, No Heat. So we flushed the system and put a new radiator in it. YAY for heat right? Right. On to the next issue with Poop browniness mobile. After the radiator problem the car decided it didn't really like to go more than 7 - 10 miles without a good rest. So it decided to make me stop. I could go 7 - 10 miles before the brakes would seize up on me. Oh, no not all at once, it was if I was driving with my foot on the brake pedal, the farther I would go the more pressure would be applied to the brakes. The remedy for this was to stop the car and wait. The pressure would back down after about 10 minutes and I could continue on my next 7 - 10 miles before my next stop. I shattered several sets of brake pads this way. Yes. Shattered. On several occasions I would get up early, drive to work and change my brake pads in the parking lot before work, or my dad would come to my work after he got done with work and change them for me so I could get home with out dying in a fiery Le Baron crash. We tried everything to fix this problem. We changed the Power Booster, Master Cylinder, Proportioning Valve, all the Steel lines, Brake Hoses (front and rear) and the Calipers and nothing ever fixed it. I think we put more money into this car in repairs that did nothing than what I paid for this car! Eventually I sold this car to a 16 year old who thought for sure he could fix it because Duh, I'm just a Girl! I MUST be doing something wrong! It gives me a sick sense of happiness to know he could never fix it either and it ended up sitting in a field rotting away and contaminating the ground water. Maybe if you're lucky, someday I'll tell you about the automotive travesty of existence my second car was!