we need new cars

After enjoying a nice, relaxing, long Christmas break, we've sure been slammed back into the reality of life.  And while school is awful, that's not even the topic I'm getting at here.  It's our cars.

Our little trip down to St. George a couple weeks ago started it off.  We got into our Mazda to head out, but it wouldn't start.  It just made some really weird noise I've never heard before.  So we popped the hood to find that the cables to the battery were corroded away, and there was this weird blue stuff caked everywhere.  Bryce worked on it for a minute, but we were running out of time in the day, so we decided to leave it, take the Saturn to St. George instead, and worry about it later.

Bryce bought and installed a new, non-corroded connection/cable thing to hook up to the battery.  Still nothing.  Next, bought a new battery... and then things seemed to be working.  I was at school, and since we only had one car, I called Bryce during my lunch break to have him come get me so I could do some errands for an hour.  He decided to drive the Mazda to test it out, but on the way over, it kept stalling.  Then he pulled into the parking lot and got out to pick something up from the student center.  When we got back to the car, it wouldn't go into gear, no matter how hard we tried.  So.... had to call a tow truck to come get it and take it to the shop.  Lovely.  Later that evening we got a call from the mechanic saying that the whole top of the radiator was cracked and the sensors were out so it wouldn't detect that it was overheating.  And it would cost $570 to replace.  That was a big blow... we are poor, starving college students after all.  But we had no choice.  We spent two days making it work with one car, but with both of us having such crazy schedules... it's just not possible.  So we forked over the money.  We also had to get the front headlight fixed and a new windshield put in for that dumb car last week so it would pass safety inspection this month.  Now it's basically like new and we're hoping it lasts a while.

But wait, that's not it... Bryce was at work yesterday morning with the Saturn and came back out to find that someone had busted out the driver's side window.  Yeah, completely shattered.  Gone.  Seriously??  

 I'm worried to know what might happen next.  This needs to be the end of our bad luck streak, and I know things will start looking up... I'm crossing all my fingers and toes.