Argh

This morning sure sucked. As Payton opened the passenger door to the car, I noticed it hadn’t even been latched all night. Meaning he didn’t shut the car door yesterday morning when we got home. I didn’t say anything, though, I just started the car so we could leave for school. I mean, I tried to start the car. The battery was dead. Payton’s open door caused the dome light to stay on all night, resulting in a dead battery.

I called a couple people I know, hoping to get a jump start from one of them but nobody answered. It sucks, not having anyone to help you out when things go wrong. If this had happened in Illinois, I’d have dozens of friends, family and neighbors to choose from. I really should get around to meeting more people.

The kids and I came back inside. They played DS while I got prices on a jumpstart from every tow service in town. The cheapest ended up being $35 and it took him about 30 minutes to arrive. The jump only took a couple minutes and we were on our way. As I was pulling onto the ramp to get on the highway, I flipped on the heat since the windows were fogging up. That killed the car again. I thought it’d be okay since the car had been running for 5 minutes at that point. But no.

The tow guy had called me from his cell phone earlier since he wasn’t sure where my house was so I called him back on his cell. He asked where I was, then noticed that I was right in front of him. He pulled over and gave me another quick jump. Luckily, he didn’t charge $35 again. He recommended that I stop by their shop and have the battery checked out, which was free of charge. So I took the kids to school, signed them in an hour late, and went by the shop.

The shop tells me that the battery isn’t looking too good, but it might be because it was drained overnight. They recommend a new battery which is something like $79 installed. I tell them that I’ll have to wait until later in the week when I can afford something like that. I planned to check out a couple automotive stores for cheaper batteries that I could just install myself.

So I run a few errands around town (not battery hunting though), leaving my car running as I visit each place. My last stop is the bank to cash a check for groceries later. When I come back outside to the car, it’s dead again. I’d left it running but for whatever reason, and it turned itself off. Shit. I call the battery place again and ask them to send their tow guy. I asked if they could just go ahead and bring that battery for me and I’d buy it from them. They said they couldn’t do that and I’d have to pay another $35. My hope was that if I bought the battery from them, they’d be nice enough to not charge me $35 again. But that didn’t happen. Goodbye, grocery money.

BUT the tow guy did show up with the battery and installed it for me. I’ve had no more problems since then. I’m sure I needed a new battery anyway since I’ve never bought one for this car after 4 years of owning it. Payton felt bad about it all and apologized a few times. I told him maybe he did me a favor by killing my battery now instead of it dying someday when I’m driving out in the middle of nowhere. Gotta teach those kids to be optimistic.

I might be wrong, but I think the only time I really complain about life is when my car does frustrating things. I’m pretty easygoing, but I can’t stand it when my car doesn’t work. I guess because it seems like it screws up my entire day whenever something goes wrong with it. Which it definitely did today. And I hate cars. I wish so much that I didn’t have to own one. We are slaves to these stupid machines.

But in happier news…I got really cool stuff in the mail from Spessa today. And I got a letter from some law office, representing one of the credit card companies that I quit paying last year. The letter says, “This letter is to inform you that our client has authorized us to offer you a settlement (reduction) on the remaining balance. Please call our office for details.” My whole plan with ignoring my credit cards for the past year was for them to go into collection status to eliminate the high interest rates and late fees. I didn’t expect them to offer reductions! The balance on that one is only $600. That’d be great if they knock off a 1/3 from it. I’m going to call them in a day or two.

Also, my car/renters insurance dropped. A lot. I think it’s $17 or $18 per month cheaper now. I got my first bill from them at the new rate. It was $100 per month before and now it’s $82 or so. They sent me a letter a couple weeks ago, letting me know that the rates were going down. I didn’t know insurance companies lowered your rates when they could. I thought they only raised them. I’m happy about this.

Tonight the kids and I didn’t do much. They played DS all evening (geez, 5 hours straight I think) and I worked a lot to catch up from this morning. They’re addicted to a game called Animal Crossing. It’s the online version where they can visit other worlds and have visitors in theirs. It looks completely unappealing to me. I’m more of a Super Mario Bros. person, which I finally beat on DS yesterday.

I got rid of cable TV a couple weeks ago, to save $40 per month and since I never watch it myself. The kids play DS so much now that they don’t even miss it. I still have the basic network stations, because it was cheaper to keep those than to completely get rid of it since I have internet and phone service through them. So at least we can still watch Simpsons occasionally. But TV is pointless for me. I’m too addicted to the internet to watch it. And if I had to watch one more episode of The Suite Life of Zach and Cody…

This is a long entry. I’m defragging my hard drive right now. I don’t think I’ve defragged any of my drives since I installed Windows XP in 2000. The graphical representation of them looks pretty messy. Just look how cluttered this is. Whatever happened to the old defrag with all the different colored blocks, where you could actually see what it was doing? I know Windows 98 had that, but with XP it’s just a bar across the screen and you can’t really tell how bad it is or what it’s doing. I used to sit and watch an entire drive defrag when it had the blocks. It was like a game of Tetris, but with no effort! The DOS version was especially soothing to watch. Wow, bedtime.