Goodbye, Katia.

Well, Katia was all ready for Peanut, but she’ll never get to meet the munchkin. This is bad. It is bad in so many ways and on so many levels that I can hardly believe it.

There is the obvious financial. We had dreams of a new car to replace the purple car, but knew that it wasn’t practical financially right now. We now have to buy a car and so will be out the money and stuck with car payments, and yet still only have one car that can accelerate well enough to go on freeways. And it is looking like we’ll be lucky if the insurance money covers taxes, title, and tags. Great. And we have some unknown period less than 3 weeks to pick and buy a car. No pressure.

Then there is the fact that this completely screws with our long-term car plan. The plan was to replace the purple car with a larger sedan in a year (or as soon as one of us had a job offer), then once that was paid off in a few years, replace the silver car with a minivan. Now we’ll end up with two car payments at the same time (because that purple car just can’t last much longer) and the dilemma about whether to buy a minivan before we need it or have to trade in one of the sedans in a few years. The best laid plans . . .

And then there is the sentimental. I am sad. So very very sad. Every time I picture the car I start to cry. Okay, sob. I knew I loved that car, but I didn’t realize quite how very much. I don’t even want a new car—I want my car back. It was my first car. I bought it at 21 and worked so hard to pay it off. I taught myself to drive stick shift for that car and eventually got good. Then I taught Joe to drive it and he now loves driving stick. It was always so good to me, never requiring any repairs or giving me any trouble. It was 11 years old and had 125,000 miles on it, but it ran perfectly. If the police had needed a detailed description, I could have given it, from the indent down the driver’s side where I backed into Peter’s car while I was still figuring out how to drive stick to the host of blue parking stickers on the front that is how I identified it in parking lots (I was joking the other day about how well the carseat matched, with the gray and blue), to the bird poop currently on the driver’s window. And I keep picturing the back seat with the car seat base sitting there. I miss my car. I loved that car. It physically pains me to think of people tearing her apart for parts, which I know is what is happening. They’ll get a couple thousand dollars from her parts, but they have no idea how much more that car was worth to me.