My Green Goblin

This post is dedicated to a few of my friends who have encouraged me to post a tid-bit of my somewhat boring life. (you asked for it) I loved my car. I say loved due to recent decline of my beloved little Mali. (Dark Green, 2000Chevy Malibu LS) My car and I have been through a lot of mileage together. Trips to New Life Ranch; Norman, Oklahoma; Springfield, Missouri; Colleyville, Texas; and Louisville, Kentucky. Friends, family and pets have taken many excursions with my little Mali and me. 105,000 miles worth of trips actually. We were a great team. That until as of late. Recently she has been quite finicky and quite frankly a pain in the rear. In the past 2 years I have had a window motor replaced (thanks Jeff), new tires, new fuel pump, intake manifold gasket replacement, new spark plug cables, 3 brake pad replacements (including getting the old rotors turned, getting one set of new rotors and having them turned once). All has been done at little to no cost to me due to an extended warranty or doing it myself (yes, I replaced the spark plug cables and the front brakes, I am in fact, quite handy) Some might think that I am really hard on poor little Mali and haven’t been taking very good care of her. But that is not true. While I may not keep her very clean (much to Ben’s chagrin) she gets her oil changed, not every 5,000 miles, but every 3,000 miles and her fluids were always checked and kept full. Again that is until recently. Over the past couple of weeks Benjamin or myself were putting Dex-cool Coolant (GM required anti-freeze) in little Mali’s gaping mouth every week or so. Then it changed to about every 4 days and last Friday Mali began to require Dex-cool every 12 hours. Needless to say this was not acceptable. Thus my internet search began. I used the ever convenient “Google” and typed in 2000 Chevy Malibu coolant leak and was bombarded with numerous sites to research. One site I went to (www.carcomplaints.com) revealed to me that I was not alone. No not at all. It seems that somewhere between 70,000 miles and 100,000 miles the Malibu begins its slow leak into oblivion. It is the stupid Intake Manifold Gasket. Some say that the Dex-cool is not compatible with the gasket and slowly eats it away until it begins to leak; others say it is just poor engineering of the gasket itself. Either way the consensus is clear – It is GM fault. GM has engineered a new gasket made of a different material to be used for all repairs. What they have not done is re-call the old gasket, which if you were paying attention above you saw I had replaced 2 years ago. (around 70,000 miles-ish) All this to say I am ticked off about it and we are getting ready to shell out $750.00 for the repair of a part that I had replaced 2 years ago and on any other car would not need replaced again. That really grinds my gears. EDIT: Call from shop the price is now $836.61. ugh

Boring

When I first created this blog I thought to myself "What a great way to let people know what's going on in our life!" Then I remembered we are boring.