Car Repairs

A few weeks back the wipers on my car stopped working. I don't mean that the rubber came off the wiper blades and they were uneffective, but rather that they stopped moving altogether. This is bad when you live in a climate where it rains. Fortunately, we do have a second car and I walk to school most of the time (when I'm not running late and my wife is nice enough to give me a ride...), so it wasn't extremely pressing. Anyway, it's a 1991 Honda Civic that I got from my parents as an undergraduate granduation present, and it's also the car that I first learned to drive on. At this point, it's blue book price is only $2500, so imagine my surprise when I go in to get the wipers fixed and they tell me they want to make about $1800 of repairs on it: broken wiper rods, shifter cable, hood release cable, 'bad battery', and then they were suggesting that I replease the timing belt on top of that. Well, I had known about the wipers, it had been getting fairly difficult to shift between forward & reverse (dad had suspected the transmission, which it fortunately was not), the hood had required two people to open it the last couple times, and the battery had died a couple times over the winter (...after the lights had been left on). Anyway, so many of those things were at least somewhat reasonable. In any case, after a couple weeks of agonizing and looking over old repair receits (my parents had religously kept them all), I finally took the car in and got the wipers and the shifter cable repaired today. The battery I can replace myself for half the price (and it's still works well enough to start the car), and it turns out it's only been 15k miles since my parents replaced the timing belt (to replace every 60k miles...), and I don't see a problem with it taking two people to open the hood. I must say that it's really nice to have wipers that work again and it's so easy to shift gears now. Between that and the free car wash, my old car has a nice, shiny feeling now. :)