Cars only seem to exist to cause grief. Phenomenally useful to the point of necessity, yet inevitably prone to messy, expensive failure. No matter what breaks on a car (and something will always break), you can depend on the repair costing a goodly percentage of your monthly expenses.

Mine is about to cost us a tidy bundle. Needs a new distributer, and something called axel boots. So our axels can walk around in the snow? Something like that. (Or maybe it's someone's name. Doesn't that sound like the name of a rock singer? Axel Boots, live at the Civic Center! Or a German politician. Chancellor Axel Boots today announed...whatever German chancellors announce.)

Edit: Please, no one else explain to me what axle boots are. I know what axle boots are, because 1) the mechanic told me, and 2) I have an internet connection; potentially, I know everything.

Those are the big things; there's a laundry list of minor repairs we've been letting go til we got around to it. Our round tuit having finally arrived, we're also replacing the windshield and the left blinker. They wanted $130 to replace the passenger side sun visor, but I think I'll just start handing out sunglasses to my passengers.

Aaron's car, meanwhile, needs a new passenger side mirror. I'm still not used to parking in a garage, and...well, I had a little incident pulling out last week. Don't look at me that way, you've done it too. At least, Aaron has. The Nissan dealership is going to start keeping an extra supply of pre-painted Sentra mirrors in stock just for us.

Grief, nothin' but grief.