In Which Murphy Puts His Two Cents In . . . .

The acquisition of "Silvertip" (I'm still trying these out, so bear with me) didn't go very well yesterday. I called my insurance provider and switched the Camaro's coverage to the 850 ("Silverback"?) without any trouble.
"Heck," I thought to myself in a naive tone of voice, "this is easy. Now off to the DMV!"

Now, people love to be snarky about the DMV, and these people certainly weren't all that friendly, but it wasn't their fault that I couldn't register "Sterling." That happened because the seller and his wife are both named as owners on the title, but only he signed the sale box. The box with only his name turns out to be the address box. So the good news was that my trip to the DMV was very quick, and my issue was resolved. The bad news was the resolution: "Come back when you have the title signed." As I say, that wasn't their fault. On the other hand, they did seem to enjoy it more than I would consider appropriate.

The seller and his wife live over two hours away, and I can't make that drive this week, so I FedExed the title to him in a fairly secure manner. He says he'll have his wife sign it and send it back; I'm hoping to have it back by tomorrow or Thursday.

In other news, I have a Camaro tire thumping and making noise ever since I filled it with Fix-A-Flat; it's hardly noticeable at low or high speeds, but between about 50 and 65 miles per hour, it's enough to make me feel a little ill. So I took the car to a cheap tire place, where they very helpfully determined two problems:

1. My license plate sticker is expired; there's no sign of the new one we bought for September.

2. I never put the special locking-lug key socket back in the glove compartment, so they couldn't even remove the wheel.

So we've got one Ford Minivan that's working pretty well (since we paid through the nose to have the brakes redone on Saturday), one Volvo that runs great but has no license, one Camaro that runs but doesn't have a valid license sticker (If a cop runs my plates and they come back valid in the computer system, I hope that overrules the outdated sticker, because I'm really not sure what I did with that thing), and finally, the 1986 Chevy pickup sitting out back with a load of gravel in the bed. It's starting to get a little crowded around here again. But I got some repairs done on the Camaro last night, and once I get the tire situation sorted out I expect it to sell pretty quickly. There's no shortage of teenagers who want to look fast in something low and red.