Farewell, Jimmy Changa.

Life is fragile. Sometimes our morning light is darkest before the brightness of the dusk, and sometimes tomorrow's sun fails to set without rising on the promise of yesterday.

And sometimes a good friend bids us farewell. Yesterday at the ripe age of 23, James Changa, known to all of us as "Jimmy" left this world...but will never leave our hearts. He'd been Daniel's driving buddy for 5 or so years. Sure, he had his flaws. He drank too much--sometimes a whole can of power steering fluid in a month. He didn't have what one would call a functioning air conditioning system. And sure, you might have had to hold your soda cans in your lap since he was born before the invention of cup holders. But let's focus on the positives. He, uh, let's see...ah yes, he had an engine. And mirrors. Oh, and he had an analog clock so you could know what time it was even when the car was off. A sweet soul. Lots of memories.

As you can see, I spent a lot of time weeping over the loss of my dear friend Jimmy. Who can really understand these things? It was simply his time to go. All I can do is believe he is in a better place--perhaps the recycling center.

You see, Jimmy had pretty bad breath. And the state of Texas said his bad breath was making our air dirty. So the state said it'd give us $3000 if we junked our friend Jimmy and got ourselves a newer buddy with better breath. What can we say...we sold Jimmy into slavery. Perhaps this makes us bad people, but we did what we did. And here's our new buddy.

We haven't found out his name yet, but for now, let's just call him Mr. Toyota Matrix. We think we'll be friends for a long time.