Trying to Stop Smoking

On the drive from Philadelphia to NE Ohio for Christmas, we had a little "incident" with the minivan. A stalling, lurching engine would be bad enough, but billowing plumes of acrid smoke from under the hood contribute to circumstances which, to say the least, do not inspire confidence in the vehicle. Being 300 miles in either direction from a) home, and b) our destination, we had a range of options available to us, none of them great.

To make a long story short, we made it to where we needed to be, despite the failing transmission. The last couple of hundred miles gave me a new crop of gray hairs to add to the existing collection, but that's the inevitable price demanded by an exciting day. At least it stopped smoking when I shut the engine off.

The minivan is now parked on a street a couple of miles from where I am now. There it will stay until I figure out exactly what to do. Might be a clutch plate, might be something more. Either way, I'm not going to sink more money into this thing. We've wrung the last drops from this husk; it's time to cut our losses and move on.

We were planning on getting a new vehicle after the holidays, but this sudden catastrophic failure has forced my hand. A new minivan will run anywhere from $30,000 - $40,000, an expenditure I was not expecting to make at the After Christmas DoorBuster Sales.

I make about $2 for every copy of "Verbosity's Vengeance" sold as an e.book. If any of you would like to buy 80,000 copies real quick, I'd be cool with that.

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