It's a boy! It's a girl! It's a ... Monk?

When last we left our heroine, Joy was shaken but determined to get a new car to replace Genie. We had been working on the project for a bit over a month. We knew her time would eventually come, but hadn't sensed the urgency of it until last Tuesday. So we stayed up the night of the accident doing research on cars to figure out what kind of car we wanted.

We managed to narrow down the list to our top 9 car makes and models that did not offend our various constraints. (That is, we got rid of the worst gas milage cars, the worst built cars, the ones whose parts cost the most, the highest milage, within our price range, and so on to get a list of cars that were at least mediocre in every category we cared about.) On the top of the list was the Oldsmobile Intrigue, which we estimated we could find from the year 2002 for about six thou. That was primarily my part of the work, the theory, though Joy worked on compiling auto reliability records.

Joy did the empirical part, calling used car shops and so forth. She was rather surprised to find very poor customer service and either unwilling or unknowing sales reps, mostly. There were a couple of good ones. She compiled a list of cars that actually existed in our area that we could compare to our ideal.

Wednesday night, Joy couldn't relax and didn't want to have fun. She just wanted to find a new car. So I decided that the better part of romance was to find her one, and we did some more searching around midnight. We searched the Ithaca Journal classifieds online, and they directed us to cars.com, and they directed us to a car we didn't really believe existed: a 1998 Oldsmo Intrigue with a whopping 21,000 miles on it.

No, there are no missing zeroes.

We contacted the dealer who admitted the car was not a hoax, and we drove down Thursday to have a look. They had only JUST gotten the car on Saturday, a trade in from first-owner Elizabeth Taylor. (Granted, Liz is her middle name, but it's a good story.) They hadn't even had time to do their own repair work on it by the time we got there. They were amazed we had heard about it since they only posted it Tuesday. The dealer confessed that it must have been meant for us. We were inclined to agree.

He agreed to hold the car for us and give us first bid after it was fixed up. We checked out a few other cars, but none were as wonderful as the leather-upholstered, chrome-wheeled, spacious beauty we found at the Binghamton Auto Exchange. So we agreed to purchase it this week, and they called yesterday to say the car was ready for us.

We are in the car, which we have named Monk, returning home under a gorgeous sunset. It's very comfortable, with a smooth ride, a great heating system, and will soon get a replacement radio since the first tape we put in him has been eaten. But once we find a way to get it out, the 12-CD exchange player in the trunk will be pumpin out the tunes. "Tabernacle Choir and Bach" says my wife who is tuned to an 80s station, "And Olivia Newton John!" We're very pleased and hope to get a good 8-10 years out of him, with his sun-bleached green dashboard:

Why Monk? Well, we got the car in Vestal, and it's so little driven that I proposed calling it the Vestal Virgin. But our last car was a girl and we're having a boy, and so Joy wanted a boy name. Virgil was a possibility, but Mom suggested Monk. They're celibate and make good detectives too. Joy confesses she thinks of the detective, and I do too.

Thank you, Ms. Taylor. Thank you, Binghamton Auto Exchange. Thank you, Geico, for taking good care of us in the meantime. Thank you, God, for preparing such a fish to swallow us.