how to lose two cars in two days

so, needless to say (which of course is why i'm saying it anyway), it's been a weird past few days. 'twas to have been a nice and much-needed four-day weekend for the both of us, and while it was technically four days, er...something was a bit lacking in the latter half of it. i think the whole crash scenario is really what did it, although i could be wrong. XD

i forgot to mention, though: one OTHER stupid thing the lady (in all her infinite idiocy) said. and our combined response to her.

IIRC, it came after Spaz remarked on where the bumper of her car had hit ours. we were shocked the window glass hadn't shattered from the impact, honestly. her Blazer didn't make contact with it, but it was only a few inches below that. fat lot of good those disgustingly gigantic bumpers insisted on for all new vehicles sold in the US do then, right? it's such a complete and utter load of shit. apparently mounting the bumpers up as high as they are on SUVs sold here wasn't enough of a safety risk for anyone with the distinct misfortune of being hit by one of these things and not (gasp!) being in a gas-guzzling, overpolluting death hog on wheels (which should require special, stringent certification to drive in the first place, but mysteriously doesn't). oh, no---because of certain regulations here, our bumpers are HUGE by comparison with stock bumpers required in most other countries round the world. why? because we get in more accidents, and bumpers are thought to make us safer. which wouldn't be such incredibly flawed reasoning were it not for the fact that SUVs and other trucks here have their bumpers (and headlights, but that's less of a safety rant, really) mounted up so high that this makes them even MORE dangerous to anything out on the road that isn't a fellow SUV/truck.

ANYWAY. so, Spaz commented on where her Blazer (which we found out was a '92 later on, in the police report---we'd initially thought it to be from sometime in the mid-to-late '80s, by body style and wear on the thing) had hit our Jetta, and she said something about how she'd been thinking about getting a new car, but she's got a bunch of kids and her husband to consider, and they just don't make station wagons anymore.

which made both of our eyes pop out of our heads; it's been some sort of mission to get people we know who are considering buying giant SUVs to instead consider all the various station wagon options that are available. specifically, lately we've been trying to convince Spaz' mom of this, as the lease on her Chevy Blazer is up very soon and she had been looking for a new vehicle.

now, it's understandable that if you've got a large family and/or drag a lot of stuff around with you on a pretty regular basis, you're going to want a vehicle with room to do so comfortably, right? this isn't the problem. what IS the problem is thinking that most SUVs are the way to go in order to achieve this. yes, they look big and imposing on the outside---but on the inside? most of them have an incredible amount of very poorly used space. you get MUCH more usable space out of a station wagon than you do out of an SUV that's virtually twice its size.

so anyway, we ran down a huge, huge list of station wagons still being made today. until the WRX came out, Subaru was probably best known here in recent time for its Outback and Forester wagons---and you've got the bonus of all-wheel drive there as well, which i know would sell a lot of people on them. and although it's ass-ugly IMHO, there's also the Ford Taurus wagon. and the Saturn wagon. and i think Toyota still makes a Camry wagon, and there's always the Mazda Protege5 (which was the main competition in my head against the MINI Cooper as to what i was aiming to get in a few years). there's the Ford Focus wagon. there are slightly older Mitsubishi Diamante wagons, i believe. Volkswagen makes Jetta and Passat wagons which we get here as well. and if you go slightly higher up the line, there's at least one Saab wagon, the absolutely spectacular Audi All-Road (which we were trying to sell Spaz' mom on; honestly, i could totally see her in one of these, and it's comparable price-wise with the SUVs she was admiring pretty heavily), and of course BMW and Mercedes both make wagons in addition to their much newer entries into the SUV market.

if i'd had paper, i'd have written her a list. but i didn't. she looked kind of dazed, though---but she looked that way before we started rattling off our huge list of wagons.

drives me nuts---no, they aren't advertised nearly as well as SUVs and even normal passenger cars are. but they do exist. and i'm sorry, but if i were going to plunk down a large amount of money for anything, you'd better believe i'd want to do my research first and make sure i was making the best choice i possibly could.

it makes me really sad, to realise that yes, there are people who are that brainwashed by adverts and "experts" and the like.

...utterly flaky bint.

but as i said before, it's nowhere near as bad as it could have been. i'm still a bit sad, but we had been trying to figure out what to do with that car anyway---the '98 Jetta GT (in the lovely colour known as "silver arrow") had just been sold to Spaz' brother the day before this happened. yesterday, the lady's insurance company called to offer up a rental car, at their expense. we're not sure how long this'll last for, but they then called the rental place, which came and picked up Spaz so he could go pick out a car. due to their being out of all the cars in the $20.99/day range which the insurance company had agreed to pick up the tab for, they upgraded for free to the next higher class---which ended us up with a Saturn of some sort. it's an automatic (of course, it being a rental place and all), and it's in bad need of both a bath and an alignment. but it's a car, and will get us to work (well, me via the train) and the grocery store and such. trunk space is rather pitiful, though. reminds me of a Civic. XD

probably more later; also probably less ranty. ^^