Christmas in August

Our truck started having problems almost two years ago. It just started shifting funny. We took it to a mechanics shop, and they couldn't get it to do what we said it was doing, so we took it home. Yay for saving money, but it didn't solve any problems. Fast forward to this year, it had so many weird problems, we were sure it was going to cost us a fortune to get it fixed by this point, so we just were dealing with it. One of the tail lights was out. The license plate lamp was out. If the lights were on, the left blinker didn't work at all, and the truck wouldn't shift out of first gear. Which is a problem when you're driving in the dark. There have been many late nights/early mornings driving around either a. in the dark with the lights off, or b. no faster than twenty miles per hour. Mostly we tried not to drive it after dark, but there were sometimes circumstances that forced us to break that rule.
Last year it passed inspection with no problem. Which is kind of astonishing. This year, when we got our registration notice, Kenny took it to two different places, both of which promptly denied our inspection certification when they saw that the blinker didn't work with the lights on...among other things. Since all of the problems seemed to be related to the lights, we had them investigate a little further to see if they could find the problem. Within hours of working on the truck, they had it narrowed down to a problem in the tail lights. The lights that were on the truck when we bought it were not the original factory tail lights. Someone installed those later, and apparently jerry-rigged the wiring. Which was what was screwing us over now.
Kenny went to a salvage yard, and within days, we had new tail lights, which fixed every single one of the stupid problems the truck was having.

Suddenly we have two perfectly working cars again, and it's like Christmas. So apparently, sometimes it does pay off to take your car into a mechanic. Go figure...