Over a Barrel

Geez. A friend asked "How is your car?" today and I realized I forgot to tell you. When last we spoke, our Jetta wagon was in the shop up in North Carolina and I was stranded up there (the horror) waiting for it. They had quoted a price of $914 to fix it. Then Matt called them and did his thing, a thing he describes as "mumblebuzzing around," and they took off a couple hundred bucks. He told them to go ahead and fix it; it was to be ready last Friday.

Friday came and Jenni and her family arrived. Yay! Matt was coming back up that night to commence another weekend of fun. I had managed to forget all about the Jetta. Then Matt called and said, "You won't believe this."

When somebody says "You won't believe this," it is almost never something unbelievably good. He told me that the car people called him and said that after fixing the other thing they discovered that the water pump was also bad and it would be another $600-something to fix.  He sputtered. They amended that to $500 and said the car wouldn't be ready until the next Tuesday.

Gloom.

Anyway, Tuesday turned into today, and they've called to tell us the car is ready. We're not in NC, but we will be heading up tomorrow with yet more friends, so we'll redeem it then. We are spending an assload of money on that car and it was not money I'd planned to spend.  Hate that but oh well, fine, GAH!

This falls into the category of Problems That Money Can Fix. It's the other category that really gets you.

We had a super time with our company, though, even though the view was disgracefully hazy and the dog might have licked some of the graham crackers we were making s'mores with. We went tubing and read magazines, and we watched True Grit, which was great if a little mannered in that Coen Brothers way. The kids got along beautifully, and I saw a Scarlet Tanager. Which is a bird.

Hope you're staying cool. Smacks!