Why I no longer own a Ford.

I have never owned anything but Fords. At the time of the Focus wreck of 2004, the immediate family at my parents' house owned five red Fords. With the total lack of injury from the accident wherein an SUV wrecked our 2003 Focus, the decision to get another Focus was easy. But Ford messed around with their dealerships, and no one has the 2005 Foci (!) they were promised. The black one we ordered was never going to come in time for the return to Illinois. And Ford was no longer making the 170 horse power SVT Focus, since they were replacing it with the Focus ST, a sedan with only 150 horse power and none of the coolness of the SVT. So my friend showed me how to drive a stick shift with his 1979 Honda Civic (a very cool car), and we test-drove the all-powerful SVT. Well, the wife -- who has no driver's license, mind you -- hated it. We had a huge fight. And that was that. It was either get a 2004 Focus with no ABS or anything else we wanted just to get a damned automatic transmission -- or get a different car. Enter the 2004 Mazda 3 s-series hatchback. I've had a jones to drive that mean-looking car since I first saw one. We took one out, and we loved it and bought it. Simple as that. And it has so many space-aged safety features (including three I'd never heard of) that our insurance went down a lot -- which is good, since the car was a hell of a lot more expensive than a Focus. We're happy. It's faster than any Focus made now, and we really didn't want a 2004, since it was the same car we had and would only make us sad to drive it -- reminding us of the wreck and all that. It has one of those auto-manual transmissions, a moonroof, 6-disc CD player, power everything, 17 inch racing wheels with performance tires, and a level of coolness that the cutesie Focus never quite achieved (excluding, of couse, the SVT). It's silver, with a black interior that has red trim. Being a foreign car doesn't bother me at all, but I'm still feeling weird that the logo on the grill is not that blue Ford oval. I keep promising pictures, and there will be some soon.