Oh, the driver's side mirror USED to be heated. (Or it allegedly used to be heated, I never noticed any difference). A couple of bad whacks while backing out of my drive (it took me a while to learn exactly where the funny angle is in my drive), and one from an errant football thrown by a Youth Group kid, ended the connection of the wires that heated it.
I don't really feel that I need a heated mirror.
I don't know. If I was fairly certain it was going to be less than $150, I'd just go to the dealer and say, "New mirror. Make it so." But I suspect that new, model-specific mirrors are probably more costly than I want to pay on a 10 year old car. (Heck, if I'm going THAT route, I might as well take it to the body shop, get the dent pulled out of the door where I hit the trashcan, and get the peeling paint on the hood scraped off and redone. I hate that my car looks like a beater but I have this horrible sinking feeling that if I put in the $500 or whatever on the bodywork, either something horrible will go wrong on the car (like the transmission will die again) that will render it undriveable, or, I will have some kind of huge house-expense (I am still bracing for what the drainage correction will cost) that will make me regret sinking the money on the car).
Of course, if I did the body-shop thing, I'd have to either rent a car for the several days, or beg and plead with someone (and then live with their schedule) to drive me back and forth. (I could possibly walk to work. But not if we're in the middle of a 2" an hour rainstorm).
I don't know. These kind of things just exhaust me. These are the kind of things where I sort of curl up in a ball and sob, "If I had been smart enough to get married, I would have someone else here to help me take care of this." Of course, that's not really true...I know people with spouses who wind up shouldering not only their own life-burdens, but their spouse's as well. And I realize it's an illogical reaction...but I remember as a kid, when something went wrong with one of the cars, it was so SIMPLE....my dad drove the car out to the shop, my mom followed him, she drove him home, and then we managed with one car until the car in the shop was fixed.
If I ever write that handbook on how to be a grownup (the one I THOUGHT you got issued at age 18, but I never did), I'm going to include a chapter on how many things tend to be more complicated than you expect they will be.
As for thinking about a new car: so not ready for that yet. Not just the cost but the complication, the bargaining, the wondering if I got a raw deal or not, the worrying about recalls....
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It must have just been one of those days. My car license expires this month and my driver's license expires Friday. So I got my car safety inspected, etc. and thought I'd take care of that stuff today. I couldn't find what I did with the inspection papers. Finally, they turned up and I headed off to the license office. When I got there, I discovered I should have taken my insurance card (one in wallet was expired) and I needed personal property tax receipts for the last two years. Thank God for computers ... the clerk was able to verify all that stuff in her computer. Once I had the new plates, I got in line for the driver's license. I was doing okay until I had to take the vision test. I had mistakenly worn my computer glasses instead of my regular glasses. So I came home, got the right glasses and went back. Now both licenses have been renewed but I don't have the correct screwdriver to put the plates on the car. This should be so simple but life was really complicated today. I have to take my sister for blood tests tomorrow and I'll see if her husband has the proper kind of screwdriver.
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