We have a new car. Okay, an old car. It’s an ‘88 Taurus with a whole lot of miles on it (over 200,000), but it’s in excellent shape. We bought it from someone who calls himself a “car crazy”—he loves cars, and it shows. The Salvation Army came today and took the old rig away. Goodbye, Chevy, you have served us well.
Now all we have to do is complete all the paperwork. Buying a used car requires a lot of paperwork. It had vanity plates, which requires a special form to be filled out by the seller either giving up the plates, signing them over to someone else, or keeping them but removing them from previous vehicle. The woman at the DMV who helped me do most of the paperwork acted as if it were the worst sin of the automobile industry for the owner not to remove the plates before giving us the car. Amazing.
I’ve been reading some more about the anthrax scare, and while I agree that getting it would be awful, there’s something even worse. There are people pleading with drug companies to give them Cipro and other anthrax antibiotics, presumbly so they’ll be ready if they get a power-filled envelope. Never mind how unlikely that is; using these drugs unless you’re actually infected is dangerous. If they’re used too widely, the bugs develop immunities to the treatments. I have friends who complain when people buy anti-bacterial soap for the same reason: yes, you kill some of them now, but there will be those that survive, and resistant strains develop. It’s a cycle. We need to be very careful about this.