Farewell Dwight (or maybe Daphne), Hello Ralph!

No, we haven't fallen off the face of the earth. Things have just been pretty busy the past little bit. I took some classes summer semester, we went to Wicked while it was in Salt Lake (Thanks Mom and Dad for my Christmas gift), followed by a family trip to Disneyland with the Simmons' (pictures coming eventually), my parents came home from their mission in Russia, lots of family activities while my brothers were in town and Michael tackled his first semester of school in about 10 years (and got all A's!), and is doing just as well with his classes this semester. We're both still working full time and trying to spend as much time as possible with Finnalyn and friends. Things have just been super busy and blogging kind of fell to the bottom of the list of things to do.

Our cars have both been throwing fits for the past little while and we've been looking at getting a new car. Michael and I carpool to work most days and usually drive Dwight (my car), so we weren't too surprised when he started having issues about a year ago. It was time for inspection/renewal, and the check engine light came on. We thought 'Perfect timing. We'll get that checked out and get safety/emissions done at the same time.' When the mechanic ran the codes, it threw an improper 4th gear ratio (whatever that means). So we took it to a transmission shop, left it there for the day and got a call back from them saying 'We don't know why it's throwing that code. It drives fine, can't find any problems with it, come pick it up.' So we brought it home, parked it in the garage for a few days, and used Daphne (Michael's car). The end of the month rolled around and we decided that we needed to get my registration taken care of. When we started Dwight again (after about a week of just sitting in the garage), the check engine light had turned off. So we quickly took it up to Jiffy Lube and he passed inspection! We continued driving him pretty much every day (since he's the more fuel efficient of our two cars) until he started having battery issues (about 6 months later, and the amount of corrosion on the terminals didn't help matters). Again, we left him in the garage, with the battery detached this time, and used Daphne for a little bit, trying to postpone the inevitable fact that we needed to buy a new battery. About a month later, we finally bit the bullet and bought a new one. Dwight drove fine again until about a month and a half later when he suddenly decided he wouldn't shift out of park, a few days after the check engine light turned back on (go figure. We finally get one thing taken care of and new issues pop up). We were able to override the transmission and get him home and into the garage and have been driving Daphne pretty much since then.

After Dwight was out of commission, Daphne decided then that she was going to start acting up too and didn't always want to start. We discovered that was because there was a missing bolt on the starter cable and sometimes the cable was touching enough to close the circuit, and sometimes it wasn't. So we got that fixed and kept driving her. A week or two after we got that starter problem figured out, she decided that she still didn't always want to start and sometimes will die while driving her (only happened once and it wasn't on the freeway thankfully). We think her new issue is a faulty crankshaft sensor, so we're hoping we can get that fixed easily and it will solve both the sudden dying issue as well as the occasional starting problems.

Anyway, this isn't supposed to be a list of problems with our cars, it's supposed to be a 'we have a new car!' post. When I first thought of doing this post, back when Dwight first started having problems, it was going to be titled "Farewell Dwight, Hello Ralph!" But then Daphne started throwing fits (and she is the older of the two cars, but Dwight has more miles), so we aren't sure which car will be worth it to repair and which one we'll be saying farewell to.

Like I said, we have been looking at buying Ralph for close to a year now. He used to belong to Michael's grandpa (whose name was Ralph, hence the name of the car), and he passed away in September of 2010. We feel incredibly lucky that the car was still available for us to get, and know that it was very well taken care of. It is a 2003 Jeep Liberty, and only has just shy of 75,000 miles on it. We've only had it for a day (Happy Valentine's to both me and Michael), but both of us love it already! Michael had his dad pick him up from work in the middle of the day yesterday and made all the arrangements to get it home before returning to work and leaving me none the wiser. I picked him up from work and when we got home, I was unable to park in my spot in the garage because there was a new-to-us car parked there! I was (and am) so excited to have a new car and not have to worry whether or not it will start or shift appropriately!