The Fuzzy Line.

I have spent four and a half hours sitting in traffic between yesterday and the day before. I took Kasey to her Rabbit Haven new adoptee vet appointment in Los Altos and got stuck in commute traffic coming home. I went to the DMV and got a form for Joseph and got stuck in commute traffic coming home from that. It was a DMV form that cant be printed on the computer and has to be an original, not a photocopy with the signatures on it.

Its his crazy junk truck problem. We bought him a '98 Acura to drive when he graduated high school and got his license. He chose the Acura. He really wanted a Bronco but we said no because of the high insurance cost. The Acura was a little high maintenance but many of the problems were from not checking oil and coolant. It was old and needed oil and coolant regularly.

He talked us into signing it over to him so he could swap it for a '90 Bronco. We told him he was now in charge of paying his own insurance. The Bronco is a piece of shit. He has gotten so deep into dept trying to keep it running. Sadly, he spent most of his paychecks on eating out and buying extras stuff for the bronco like a sound system and light bar and things to make it louder, instead of saving so he could afford to fix it the next time it broke down. Its been sitting in front or our house for two months now because he could not keep it running, nor control his impulse to drive it somewhere if he could get it started and end up making it worse.

We are helping him out because that is what families do, but we are not loaning him a car because then there would be no problem for him from making a bad decision. Plus, having him drive our truck makes it very high maintenance for us. He drives like an idiot and he has to pay associated costs of that until he figures it out. Parenting is tough. There is a very fuzzy line between helping and enabling.

So what he decided to do was buy another Bronco from Craigslist from a guy who got it from a picknpull. The sale to the picknpull was a lien sale. It isn't licensed. He figured he could sacrifice it for parts to fix the current heap. Turns out is is in better condition that the heap he wanted to fix, so now he has to strip the first heap of anything usable and get the new heap registered and repaired.

He is nineteen years old and I believe this is age appropriate behavior. He is learning a lot, though it seems to be trial by fire. A lot of things in life are just that.