Civic Duty

Enter Ezra
Originally uploaded by Rwilliams718

Friday My Lovely Wife™ and I found ourselves over at the local Honda dealership.

She bought a Civic 3 or 4 years ago, based mostly on Consumer Reports' recommendation. I have been jealous of it for quite a while, as I have been driving an Exorcist-puke-green Nissan Sentra since '03 and I hate it. 'Solange' was clunky, she creaked, and her belts and joints were starting to slip.

We do most of our traveling in my car, because I am a control freak and I prefer to drive (also because My Lovely Wife™ drives like she's living in an incarnation of Grand Theft Auto... and yes, I have seen her actually kill a hooker who just restored her heart meter to 100%... IN REAL LIFE) we end up putting the bulk of our mileage onto whatever I am currently in charge of.

So when our booger-green/gold Nissan was flirting with 100,000 miles, I started to get antsy about getting a new car. A NEW car. I'm 33 years old and I have been driving used ones since I was 16. NEW. No miles on it. A car where the first seat-cushion fart will be MINE.

There's something that you should know about My Lovely Wife™, when it comes to making a major purchase; she's very difficult to convince. She will go without buying microwave popcorn if it is more than $3 a box. Any mention of spending a few hundred on a TV set or a new lens for my camera sends her into overdrive.

BUT- she IS an accountant. And one thing that an accountant can never resist is a low interest rate.

Seriously. Draw a pentagram onto your floor with a stick of chalk. Drop a slide-rule on the north point and write "4.7% APR for 30 Months" in the center of it. My wife will appear in your home with a burning ledger in her left hand and a roll of adding machine tape in her right.

She had NO intention of letting us get a new car this weekend. But we test drove 3 or 4 of them anyway, just to get a feel.

When the Honda dealership offered her 2.9% Financing for a 2008 Civic or Accord, her eyes popped out of her skull and her hair stood on end.

For normal people, I am just trying to explain that we got a hell of a deal.

I picked the 08' Civic EX. Its' not as 'showy' (read: vain) as the Accord. But it's packed with features and it's the sexiest gray/silver/charcoal color ever made. Our guy 'gave' us the sun roof visor, door guards, splash guards and trunk liner for free, and I spent an hour scraping the double pinstripe off the sides of it, because pin stripes are dumb.

It's a fucking awesome car.

I call it Ezra. Because I name my stuff.

Ryan's happy.