My life story about cars is quite a depressing one. I spent the money I had saved all through my childhood on a Mazda MX-6 owned by a family friend. The car ran... periodically, and eventually I drove it from Washington to Colorado to move in with my best friend's ex girlfriend [also a long, depressing story]. The car made it there, but blew a hole in the engine just over the state line and it now lies in southern Wyoming, presumably dying a slow rusty death.

Fast forward 6 months.

I took a job working as a security guard for a hydroelectric plant making decent money [~35k a year working part-time while I was going to school] and my friend's father offered me his newest project car [his hobby was working on Mercedes and he sold me this one for ~800 dollars and helped me with all the work] - a 1987 Mercedes-Benz 190E 2.3L. It seemed like a dream come true, but after time I began to realize that the fuel system was shoddy [as it would start, but not stay started without almost flooding the carburetor]. After a very expensive diagnostic, I was told by a local shop that I needed to replace a burned out fuel pump regulator, which I promptly did, but to no avail. The combined efforts of my friend's dad and my wallet didn't seem to make an effective solution for my car, and I was quickly growing sick of not being able to drive my car anywhere.

Fast forward 3 months.

I drove the Mercedes off and on [whenever I could fight with it enough to get it started] but largely I was borrowing my parents' second car to get to and from work and school. A co-worker of mine asked me about possibly trading my Benz for one of his spare cars [he had a few sitting around that he had accumulated over the years that he didn't drive much], specifically his 1992 XJ(40?) Sovereign [I think the appropriate model number is XJ40 but I'm still new to this so hopefully you guys will forgive me for getting it wrong]. I told him that it had a rough time starting but that the local shop I took it to gave me paperwork and said it was just the fuel pump relay, and he said that as long as he could get it back to his place to work on later, we were in business.

Fast forward to 12 hours ago.

I brought home my [relatively speaking] brand new Jaguar and fell asleep at about 6am reading the manual. It has a few problems here and there [dash lights won't turn off, seats need to be reupholstered, driver's door won't open from the outside, headlights are both cracked from an earlier vandalism, power steering isn't working (I was told this is because the reservoir] but it seems like it's just going to take a little bit of determination and a weekend of tinkering to fix a couple of things for convenience sake.

So that's me. thanks if you read the entire thing. If you didn't, you're not missing out on much. I'll apologise in advance for all the dumb questions I'm probably going to ask over the course of the learning curve.