The spider

I got a new car.  It's a 2017 Fiat 124 Spider.  Here is a photo:

Gorgeous, right?  It's a convertible.  It is an awesome car.  Fun to drive.  Stick shift.  Turbo.  Quick 0 to 60 ( or 80... ).  Best car ever!

As my friend Sandy said, "Way to rock the midlife crisis, LegalMist!"

Question:  does it count as a midlife crisis car if you have wanted it since you were 25 but couldn't make it work until now?  Actually, I wanted a Mazda Miata when they came out in 1989.  Here is a 1989 Miata:

Cute, right?

But I was just about to start law school (in 1990) and couldn't afford one.  So in 1992, I got a used 1987 Honda Prelude instead.  It was awesome too. Sporty. Stick shift. Moon Roof.  Quick acceleration.  Fun!

Then I graduated, got married, had kids, and a Miata just wasn't practical.  In fact, I had to sell the Prelude to get a car with 4 doors and room for a child safety seat.  I got a Toyota Corolla (the "Green Lady").

Well, LegalMist's Daughter (LMD) is off to college this fall, leaving only LegalMist's Son (LMS) as a potential passenger (I am planning a divorce, remember?), so a two-seater became  a possibility... I decided to get that Miata.

But then I read the Consumer Reports car guide and saw the Fiat 124 Spider, reinvented for 2017.  It was even prettier than the Miata.  Sporty.  Convertible.  Cute...  I held out for the test drive.  Finally, on July 12, the spider arrived at the dealer... I showed up right when they opened to test drive the car.  Drove the automatic.  The stick shift.  The upgraded, all-options version.  The stripped down, no frills version. Looked at all the colors.  Considered all the options.

Side note:  I loved the blue one.  But to get blue, one had to buy the "Prima Edizione" version with all options, including automatic transmission (what's the fun in that?!) and leather seats (in Arizona, I prefer cloth).  They only made 124 of them (get it? The "124" spider?), and they came with the free t-shirt and poster and a numbered plaque on the dashboard to tell you which one you got.  But it cost $11,000 more than the stick-shift, cloth-seated model that I preferred.  In the end, I decided that blue paint and automatic transmission was *not* worth $11,000, so I bought the gray one pictured above.  Here is a photo of the pretty blue one:

Nice, huh?  But I think the gray is pretty too.

I love my car.  It is so fun to drive to work now.  It makes me smile every time I see it.  I call it my "Midlife Crisis Mobile," and it is a bright spot of joy in my otherwise not-as-joyful-as-I-wish-it-were life.  At least on the way to and from work, I can pretend to be the happy, carefree young person that I used to be instead of the somewhat sad, about-to-be-divorced, almost-old person that I actually am.


The car turns heads, even if I don't any longer.