My brother and I are very different.
But I’m realizing that sometimes we end up doing the exact same thing.
Take, for example, the car situation. At my brother’s place, they’ve got a Honda CR-V… which is really more of a Civic with a higher roof so the dogs don’t bump their heads on the ceiling than anything else. They claim that the mileage is better than a minivan. And my brother doesn’t drive to work… he either works from home or takes the bus.
I got rewarded by the landlord for my lack of environmental consumption by a nasty note threatening to tow our car. See, we’ve got two cars. Two years ago, we really did need two cars. Right now, we really don’t because I bike everywhere and it’s fairly rare that I need the car when my wife does on the weekend.
The goal is to keep a second car around for emergencies or rainstorms or visitors or stuff like that. It’s an older American car and there’s pretty much no resale value to it. Especially when you consider that the odometer had to be replaced along the way and it was never a big hit as a car. And given that I’m biking most places, I really don’t want to have a car payment for a car that’s going to sit around for most of the week.
So one car is just sitting there parked, mostly gathering dust. And a month or two ago, the tags expired. Mrs. Wirehead sent in the registration fee, because the California DMV will get really pissed off if you don’t give them your payment. But I kinda kept putting off getting the smog check because it’s not a priority that the car be actually street legal. Not when I can bike just about anywhere I need to during the week and stuff.
Now, you should understand that my apartment complex has turned into quite the shithole. The landlord seems to be quite content to ignore problems as long as they can manage. So they need to replace all of the balconies because they are all unsafe now. And they’ve been ignoring the continuous stream of theft from our building — at least one incident per month.
But apparently they are worried about the appearance of the building, or at least parking. So they went around and sent a note to everybody about the cars that looked like they haven’t been driven or had expired tags.
So, I finally had to plunk down the money for a stupid emissions check so that the DMV would send me another sticker so that my landlord wouldn’t tow my car. Meh.