It's so cool to be able to drive around again. After spending ludicrous amounts of money on it, I finally got my little 1979 Ford Escort running again. Of course, it can't go faster than 60 kilometers/hour without wobbling and losing paint, but then, the car is older than I AM!!!
It's called the Millenium Falcon, because it's the fastest heap of flying junk in Johannesburg. It's bright blue, with thin yellow "go faster" stripes down the sides, a yellow covered steering wheel, and a yellow (BRIGHT YELLOW) fishtail thing on the boot. The boot, coincidentally, doesn't close properly and bangs up and down like crazy every time I land after going over a speed bump which I saw too late.
Yesterday the car's front left wheel also fell into a large open manhole. My father remarked on the fact that the car was suddenly half a meter lower after I backed out of his driveway, and I noticed that it wasn't moving, so we got out and realized I'd driven it into a manhole. Good grief. It took 4 GUYS to get it out of the hole.
The Sony frontloader and the speakers I bought for it a year ago (when I still had money ) are worth more than the entire car!
It's heater is also stuck at MAX POWER setting, so it gets rather hot inside the car, especially on the highway when more air is going through the circulatory system. The steering wheel wobbles when I do right turns (this is very crotch-endangering if you are holding a cup of hot coffee, BTW), and the wheels only retain air for a week tops, then they need to be pumped again.
Last year I also installed a new fuel gauge sensor, after spending an entire weekend figuring out how the hell to remove the fuel tank, and now the fuel gauge works fairly well, alternating between "EMPTY" and "QUARTER FULL" every time I go over a hill and down the other side. This is the reason I have to full 2 liter Coke bottles of petrol in the boot, for emergencies.
In order to thoroughly test the car after it's engine replacement, my friends asked me to take them to a club which is about 30 kilometers away from their house. According to them, having five guys in a car all bouncing up and down on the highway while listening to really loud music and also all of them screaming simultaneously at every hot chick who happens to drive by is a great way to test a car after it's engine is replaced. The car was noticeably lower on the road after this event.
Of course, the very BEST way to test a car after you fix it up is to drive behind some really smashed guy who's had an entire Pfizer factory full of pills for the evening, and weaves across the road continuously, and takes corners at roughly Mach 4 or so, usually on two wheels. Unfortunately, I set the idling a little too low, so the car would die every few Stop streets, which did not facilitate me following this really trashed guy! Eventually I put on a burst of speed (well, to be honest, I threw one of my friends out the window), and pulled up next to him and told him to slow the hell down!
Then I got lost in Pretoria. Now, Pretoria is a rural area. And, at 3 in the morning, it is about as populated as a whorehouse opposite a church on a Sunday morning. So just picture old SYN driving around, trying to find SOMEBODY to tell him how the hell to get back onto the highway again. Urgh. Eventually, after convincing some very scared-looking dude that I wasn't trying to murder him or something, the poor feller rolled his window down and proceeded to give me directions which happened to go straight through certain rather ROUGH tribal zones, but I managed to make it in the end.
All in all, a terribly exciting day.