Where to start?

On Sunday, driving home, a two-inch-or-so crack opened up in the hose that delivers coolant to the turbo in my Eclipse. (The turbo in the 2G DSM engines is coolant-cooled instead of the usual oil-cooled.) It was a very hot day, I had been driving for a while, and it happened as I accelerated up the hill from a stoplight. It vented pretty much all my coolant very very quickly, and a few seconds later my temp gauge pegged. I heard a horrific rattling sound, and saw the gauge, and immediately pulled over.

But not fast enough.

At a bare minimum, I'm going to need a complete top-end job. The turbo may be fried. The 7-bolt DSM engines (of which mine is one) are very prone to blowing out a thrust and crankwalking within 5k miles of this kind of overheat. (For the non-engine inclined: that's very bad. Think "holes in your engine" bad.) So I may be best served by just buying a new engine.

I originally bought this car (ten years ago!) with the intent to dump a few thousand into it and make it into a scary-fast fun car instead of just a fast fun car. I've never gotten around to it, though I've done a few things in the past as parts failed. It now has a racing clutch in it, for example, and I upgraded the rear brakes when they died. I bought this specific car entirely because it's eminently upgradable. People have gotten 700+ whp out of this engine. (I'm looking for more like 400 whp, but still.)

The right answer to this is probably to buy a new engine and turbo. Obviously, I wouldn't bother to buy stock at that point, since performance parts just aren't significantly more expensive than the stock ones, and I'm paying for the same labor (or possibly doing all the same work myself) either way.

If I wasn't currently dealing with having two houses, there'd be no question I'd just take this as an opportunity to get off my butt and do the upgrades I want. (As a friend of mine said, "The universe just handed you a round tuit.") But I know if I just put the car in storage to do this later, I'll never get around to it again. I could just unload the car for whatever I can get for it, and just give up on the entire idea. Buying another one is silly. And I don't desperately need this car; we have two others and Joel and I mostly ride public transit anyway.

I can manage to come up with the money but it cuts into my reserve for emergencies I was trying to keep with the whole house situation. On one hand, your engine exploding is sort of an emergency, but it's not a required car. The purely practical solution is to find someone who wants it for parts or to rebuild and get out of it, but I didn't buy this car to be practical in the first place.

So, yeah, I'll probably end up trying to spend the money to fix it. But I'll probably also feel guilty the whole time.

Stupid, isn't it?

Oh, and as a nice postscript, yesterday I was supposed to get my new crown on my back upper-right tooth. But it broke while the dentist was trying to seat it. They're sending it back to the lab to remake.