Weekend Drama

I've had the same car for a little over 5 1/2 years now. It never seems to fail that once it's paid off and you actually OWN it, things start to break or quit working. This car was no different. Once I got it paid off I started having to fork the money over left and right to keep the darn thing operating. Over the past couple of weeks I had been noticing that the car would jerk when I'd shift it into drive. I thought that maybe it was just the cold weather, but after a week or two of that I decided I should take it in to the mechanic. The mechanic looked at it, cleaned it up, and decided that I would be best served if I traded the thing in. Of course, he said I could put a new transmission in it, but his best guess is that it would cost me around $3,000 for that...more than what the actual car was worth. Needless to say, my husband and I began car shopping last week. I hate car shopping!
I knew exactly what I wanted or at least had it narrowed down to a couple of different vehicles. I searched high and low on every car dealership website I could find. I rode up and down 123 and hit every car lot around. I just couldn't find what I wanted and started to get frustrated, but FINALLY, at my very last stop, Hendrick Honda, they said I could check out their website www.hendrickcars.com and search for the vehicle I wanted there. It is a compilation of all the Hendrick owned Honda dealerships and if I found a car I wanted off that website within a couple of hundred miles they would bring it in for me, free of charge, with no pressure to buy. I went home that night tired and frozen solid, and checked the website. Within minutes I found the exact vehicle I wanted. Within a day the car was brought in for me. After test driving it we agreed to buy it. OH MY GOODNESS! I LOVE THIS CAR!! It's a 2006 Pontiac Torrent.






BUT, unfortunately, the story doesn't end there. I brought the car home with me Friday night around 11:00 or so. The next day around lunch time I left the house prepared to run my errands and show my new ride to some friends and family. I remembered that I had left something in the back of the vehicle that I needed so I headed to the back. When I got to the rear of my vehicle I noticed red spray paint covering my back glass, covering my tag, and well, basically, all over the back of my vehicle including my bumper. I called my husband at work and asked him if he saw it when he left and he said he hadn't, but that he didn't really look because he was in a hurry. I asked him to get someone to check his vehicle and to call me back and let me know if they had gotten his vehicle too. It wasn't much later he called back and said that they had. He had red spray paint coloring in his back rim and a red streak all down the drivers side of his truck. Soooooo, I called the police and filed a report. I notified several of my neighbors and told them to be on the look out. Much to my surprise they said that on Halloween night a couple of mailboxes were sprayed, one ladies drive way was sprayed, and vulgarities were spray painted in the road, but no one filed a police report. We all believe it to be some rotten, punk kids in the neighborhood, but we can't prove it. I called the insurance company and they wanted $500 deductible on each vehicle -IF- mine is even covered since I had just purchased it and hadn't changed my insurance information over yet. WHAT A CROCK! INSURANCE IS A WASTE!
Anyway, the good news is that we worked away all weekend and were able to get the paint off of my back glass and all the paint off of my husbands truck. We're taking my car to a body shop next week to have the paint removed from my car. Lucky for me it was red spray paint on a black car so it's not that noticeable. Still makes me mad as hell fire though. PEOPLE HAVE NO RESPECT!!
I figured the police wouldn't take my report seriously. I imagine finding a random spray painter might seem like a waste of time to many of them. But we received a phone call from a detective yesterday saying that he had been up in the neighborhood looking through the woods and stuff for empty spray paint cans. He asked if we had any leads or suspicions. We mentioned the addresses of some of the kids in the neighborhood. He was a juvenile detective so he suspected kids as well. I guess we'll see from here.
It really sucks that it happened but I guess the silver lining is that it could have been A LOT worse!