Someone else bought the car before I could get there, so we are back to the beginning of this ordeal. I'd spent all morning trying to pull together the various threads--trying to reach T who was on a construction site with bad cell service, trying to reach the loan officer, who was incommunicado at various times. The end result was crushing and I cried. I so hate this process. Every decision is wrong: be too careful and you lose the vehicle; be too rash and you end up with a lemon; do anything at all and you're saddled with a financial boulder.

My over-emotions were also linked to the fact that I'd been awake all night fretting. It's hard to be serene when I've had almost no sleep. Fortunately, I did manage to drop off last night, though I had to do some work to get myself there. And I do feel less tragic this morning.

Oy. This is not how I want to live out my days--combing through Blue Book and JD Power printouts, comparing the details of CarFax reports, researching complaints about reliability, watching T plot out the horrors of loan repayment for each possibility I track down. The fact is: I don't even like to drive. I would be delighted to never drive again. But my job--which I love--requires me to travel long distances in bad weather over bad roads. And thus I must have a car, and the car must have all wheel drive, and be in decent shape, and not have ridiculously high mileage, and cannot break down all the time. This doesn't seem like a lot to ask for, does it? However, such basic parameters mean that the car will cost more than $20,000. We're in a brutal situation, no matter how we look at it.

At least we like each other, so there's that.