{"id":31540,"date":"2025-12-16T11:46:45","date_gmt":"2025-12-16T17:46:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/?p=31540"},"modified":"2025-12-16T16:15:35","modified_gmt":"2025-12-16T22:15:35","slug":"christmas-car-update","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/?p=31540","title":{"rendered":"Christmas car update."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The car passed the state emissions inspection with no problem. Other than a little bit of confusion because I&#8217;d never been to this place before, it was mostly a smooth process.<\/p>\n<p>With an inspection in hand, I can renew my car registration.<\/p>\n<p>The State of Texas used to have a simple and straightforward website for registration renewal.<\/p>\n<p>Not any more. Oh, no. Everything has shifted to something called &#8220;Texas By Texas&#8221;. So, first of all, you have to set up an account if you&#8217;ve never used &#8220;Texas by Texas&#8221; before. (I had not: I think TxT is new this year.)<\/p>\n<p>Not only do they want your email address, they also want all kinds of other information. Including your physical address, your mailing address, your driver&#8217;s license number, the <strong>audit code<\/strong> off your driver&#8217;s license, etc. etc. et bloody cetra.<\/p>\n<p>Then, once you have your TxT account set up&#8230;as far as I can tell, that&#8217;s just for your driver&#8217;s license. You have to go through a separate step to link your car registration to TxT.<\/p>\n<p>At least, once I finished <strong>that<\/strong>, I didn&#8217;t have to fill in a lot of information to actually get the renewal done. It didn&#8217;t even ask me for proof of insurance or inspection: I think all this stuff is linked by computer statewide these days.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, there were the donations. Literally <a href=\"https:\/\/www.txdmv.gov\/motorists\/register-your-vehicle\" target=\"_blank\">half a page of donations<\/a> you could make while renewing your registration:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;Support Texas Veterans&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>Texas state parks (as I recall, they want at least $5 for that)<\/li>\n<li>Organ donation<\/li>\n<li>Special Olympics<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Ending Homelessness Fund&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Evidence Testing Grant Program&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Stop Human Trafficking&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And the registration itself is $78.25 before any donations. Including $10 for bridges, $1.50 for &#8220;child safety&#8221;, $7.50 for the &#8220;inspection replacement fee&#8221; (just because the state did away with safety inspections doesn&#8217;t mean that they don&#8217;t want their money), $2.75 for the &#8220;emissions inspection fee&#8221; (that&#8217;s over and above the $11.50 state fee for the emissions inspection, plus $7 for something, I&#8217;m not exactly sure what, plus 75 cents for using a credit card), and $4.75 for &#8220;processing and handling&#8221;. Tell you what, I&#8217;ll give you $2 for processing, and I&#8217;ll do the &#8220;handling&#8221; myself.<\/p>\n<p>Nickels. Dimes. They add up, you know?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The car passed the state emissions inspection with no problem. Other than a little bit of confusion because I&#8217;d never been to this place before, it was mostly a smooth process. With an inspection in hand, I can renew my car registration. The State of Texas used to have a simple and straightforward website for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cars","category-christmas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31540"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31540\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31543,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31540\/revisions\/31543"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}