My car is officially dead.
The adjuster finally got around to the dealer's, and a couple hours later called and sent me the notice. The offer's a good one --- they valued my car at about twice what I would have guessed for it pre-wreckage; maybe I got lucky in the comparables they found --- and I suppose there is no sensible declining or postponing or anything. I just need to accept it, and clean my stuff out, and mourn the failure of insight that lost this car ... oh, probably five to seven years before it should have gone. (The offer is for enough that my father, who ``happened'' to be bored and feel like calling this evening, didn't re-raise the prospect of me buying the car back and trying to cobble it back to life, a stressor removed.)
I'll have to sign the title over to them. Which raises the question: where the heck is the title? And I have no idea. I don't remember giving it to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger for storage in the Secure Documents We Don't Know Where It Is. I remember Toyota Financial Services sending me a letter about my loan being paid off, but that was seven(?) years ago so who knows where that is anymore. I applied to the Michigan Secretary of State office's web site for a replacement title and was told my vehicle was ineligible. I e-mailed them to ask what that meant, and they sent back a form letter about how to make an appointment at the Secretary of State office to get a title.
This fills me with the dread that I may never have got my title transferred over from New Jersey. The New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission web site makes it look like there isn't a way to apply for a replacement title online, but that it can be done via mail. ... And I have no idea if they'd have the record of my lien being cleared (they should, right?), or if I have to get Toyota Financial Services to send me a letter so I can send it to New Jersey so they can send me a thing to send to AAA. I suppose what I really need to do is talk with AAA because I can't be the first person they've dealt with this week who's had this set of problems and they might know how to process all this with minimal chaos.
I fear the minimum chaos is more than I can handle.
So, back in early August, we did that visit to bunnyhugger's parents and I took a walk a little to try and not feel quite so overstuffed and all that. Here's things I saw while on that way.
Isn't that just an adorable house, with the way its attic looks like an eye that can't be bothered to open all the way? Yeah, adorable piece there.
Old-looking railing leading down to the river. It sure looks like at one point there were more canoes launching from here than there are now.
And across the river, there was music happening! At the river, I saw a turtle swimming along, but couldn't get a decent picture.
Trivia: In 1897, when his personal income was about $25,000 pa, Percival Lowell instructed his assistant that observatory expenses were not to exceed $6,000 pa. After his father died in 1901, Lowell's annual income grew to $100,000 pa. His budget for the observatory grew to $10,000. Source: The Long Space Age: The Economic Origins of Space Exploration from Colonial America to the Cold War, Alexander MacDonald.
Currently Reading: The Complete Peanuts 1979 - 1980, Charles Schulz. Editor Gary Groth.
PS: How to Make a Straight Line in Different Circumstances, a paper about optimizations that I did not write.
