I am preparing for a bit of a long car trip. I’ll be driving about two thousand miles, all told, over the course of a week, so I’ve been trying to get some things in order to make this trip happen in a way that isn’t going to destroy me. Primarily, I’ve taken my car in to get serviced. Thankfully, despite passing 111,111 miles and being almost twelve years old, there’s nothing really wrong with it. An oil change, a new oil filter, and an appointment to change out the weatherproffing seal around the driver’s door for after the holiday. Pretty small stuff, all told, and little enough that the anxiety I’ve been ignoring about needing to replace my car any time soon (which I absolutely cannot afford to do) has faded thanks to its clean bill of health following a full inspection. It is, of course, entirely possible that some significant issue is just one pothole away from bursting this sense of security, but I’ve been going to this mechanic for nearly a decade and they came well reviewed when I first started bringing my car to them. I trust their work and their thoroughness when I asked them to make sure I wouldn’t run into any problems during my holiday travels. I might still need to check the air in the tires since I prefer to put them at a higher pressure than I think they put them at (I like the top of the range of the acceptable tire pressure and they usually only fill them to the bottom), but I did forget to ask about that this time so I wouldn’t hold that against them.