It's a Jeep thing, I don't understand...

My jeep and I have a unique relationship. I suppose it's the old "give/take" routine--I give it loads and loads of money, it provides me with transportation to and from work (and not much else at this point). I'm told it's like a woman--there'll always be the initial hint of a problem, which, if not dealt with immediately, has a tendancy to blow up in your face.
Take the latest episode. What began as the faint smell of unburnt gasoline attributed to a hole in the top of the tank, quickly turned into as much gasoline ending up on the road as went into the engine.
Sometimes, I get lucky, and the repair is quick, cheap, and easy, as was the case with this one (leaking fuel filter). Other times, it's quite the opposite, and it costs me a new engine and transmission, followed by two more years of payments. Even worse, I'll just keep throwing money at it, and it'll laugh in my face, then act like nothing was ever wrong.
My laziness in repairing my jeep is two-fold. There's the procrastination part (what, me, procrastinate? Never!), and there's the howmuchamonth problem. ie, how much is this gonna cost me, and how long is it going to take me to pay for it? I'm sort of an optimist and a pessimist at the same time. On the optimism side, I always hope that whatever the problem might be, it'll be small, and I don't have to worry about it, because everything's gonna be just fine. On the pessimistic side, I'm always afraid that whatever the problem is, it's gonna cost me a fortune to fix, so I don't want to know about it.
But for all it's problems, I still love my jeep. I dunno why, she's been a royal PITA lately. But we've had a good run, and I'll miss her when she retires this fall. If she makes it to the fall.

BTW, I'm taking bets on whether my transmission will implode before I can re-run the cooling lines ;)