Consensus is I haven't gone barking mad, but still...

As I've previously alluded to, three major items are still on my list to get fully settled in.

1. I need to get rid of this rental and get set up with long-term, non-rented transport, preferably with all-weather and cargo-hauling capability;
2. I need to get net at the apartment;
3. I need to get a proper bed and some good pillows.

The third is somewhat less than urgent, given I have a futon to sleep on (though the pillows would help me sleep better; I hardly slept last night).  The second, I'm thinking Speakeasy OneLink DSL; I'm pretty sure it'll actually be cheaper than getting POTS service on my line and ordering DSL through SBC, I'll get a better data rate, they'll give me a /30, and it includes nationwide 56k dialup, so we'll be able to ditch the Earthlink dialup in Greenville and use the Speakeasy 56k until cymrullewes and the girls move out here.  What's more, it's only $19.95 for the first two months,and ditching Earthlink will save us $22 a month, so for the first two months we'll actually come out $2 ahead.

Yesterday afternoon I drove up to Dublin to look at a car to take care of #1.  I went up there planning to basically look at it as price research, not intending to buy.  (My parents are making me an interest-free car loan to avoid both auto-loan interest and potential credit-rating issues.)  The car I went to look at was a silver '98 Camaro Z28 with 57K miles for $9K -- low mileage for its age, and low price for the low mileage (average 9K miles per year).

Turned out the reason the price was so low for the mileage it was thrashed.  Someone had done a fairly incompetent job of trying to turn it into a racecar.  There were steel rails badly welded into the trunk with 1/4-20 bolts through them that I can only assume had a racing fuel cell hung on them, there was no back seat, various accessories didn't work, there were extra switches that didn't do anything, disconnected wires hanging off all over the place, the air cleaner was held closed with duct tape, there was a bracket for a regular household fire extinguisher bolted right through the passenger-side airbag ... I mean, it was a mess.  No matter how strong the engine sounded once we eventually got it to fire up, I wouldn't have touched it with a ten-foot pole except to build a racer (and probably not even then, Chaos only knows what else the previous owner had fucked with).  The salesdude (who was a website designer before the tech crash, btw) suggested they had a '99 Firebird at the same $9K price that I might want to look at, and while it was higher mileage (74K), it was in much better shape.  It too had a few problems, though, a couple of which would probably have been expensive to fix (rear hatch pulldown inoperative, driver's power window inoperative, for example).

So then, salesdude asks, "Are you interested in anything else besides a Camaro?  What's your price range?  If you can go up a little, I have a car I think you'll like."  And for $11K, he proceeds to show me a silver, immaculate, obviously meticulously-maintained, almost showroom-perfect .... '98 Mercedes C230.  ( Clicky for photo )

It's highish mileage (around 89K, about 15K per year), but it is just totally cherry.  I test-drove it, and it was great -- a little more body roll than I really prefer, but very sure-footed, agile, very tight turning circle (by comparison, the Sebring I'm renting seems to have a turning circle of about half a block), and stops like it just hooked the three wire.  EPA says 30mpg highway, too.  This was the point at which I called up my parents for a sanity check to ask whether I'd gone completely raving, barking mad.  I have never before in my life so much as considered buying a Mercedes-Benz.  I'd always figured anything in that class was absurdly far out of my price range.  And here I am, I've been employed three weeks and I'm looking at a Mercedes.  [gibber, chase own tail, gibber some more]

So the upshot is, my parents are overnighting me a cashier's check, and tomorrow I get to go up to Dublin and pick up my new-to-me [gibber, gibber] Mercedes [gibber] ....