The old green car she ain't what she used to be

Cars are sort of like people, aren't they? They don't start start getting interesting until they hit middle age, 40 or so, which would be about 10 in car years. (Or maybe it's the other way around, I've never figured that part out.)

I had an old Pontiac once that was a real fighter - way past its prime, it would scramble up hills like a cranky old goat. And a Dodge that was so stubborn it wouldn't stop running even after it had stopped running. But this car I have now, a Ford, is, well, way chilled out.

It's not that it gives me that much trouble - all the parts that aren't essential have long since dropped off and what's left pretty much works, most of the time. But it doesn't work any harder than it has to and on some days that's not very hard at all. Like today. Today it decided it didn't want to run its fan - the fan in the heating system - which means no defroster and very little warm. Which would be fine if it were 40 or 50 out there like it was last week, but right now it's 13. (It was 24 when I got up this morning and it's been going down since then. "They" still say it'll be back in the 40s by Wednesday.) Turning on the A/C helps with the defogging part but not too much with the warm.

Oh well. It still moves, which is the main thing cars are supposed to do. And in a few months it'll be April anyway. At least that's the way the car sees it, I guess. It has a point.

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