Tuesday June 4, 2002 at 10:42 pm

Okay so aside from the 2 long ass posts below, my weekend was pretty ishy. 1st I had planned to get up way early on Sat to go get my oil changed and find out why the grandma mobile was pulling to the right but wearing the left tires out. Thinking the worst I anticipated to here the ball joints, cv joints, rockers or something was out of whack and had to be replaced. I also wanted to get an estimate on 4 new tires. Okay I was hopping Discount of someplace was having a 4 for 1 deal. Did my day go as planned you ask, Does it ever? No

So I’m up at 6 am as it is from the night before and figure I’ll take a 3 hour nap and then head out, since most places here open at 10 on the weekends versus in SV where they open as earlier as 7 or 8. So 9:30 rolls around and I head out. Well apparently so did everyone else, earlier in the week and every place i went was booked for the day by 10:30. This was even after driving all the way out the edge of BFE. So i get back to my neighborhood about 1 ish and finally decided to just go to� Car Wash oil change place and get a cheap oil change done and rinse of the G-mobile.

So the guy there recognizes me and I is like was sup and yada yada, and I explain the situation and he’s says he’ll let me know if anything seriously jacked as he changes the oil. Now I’m thinking something bad with the engine is going to come to light but on the contrary. he tells me as radiator cap nearly took his head off when he was checking it, signifying the car was slightly overheating. Well duh I’d expect that driving around in 112 degree heat for nearly 4 hours straight. Anyway he tells me he checked the cap and it’s only holding 10 lbs of pressure versus the 16-18 it should hold. Then he explained how most of the liquid was water, okay like almost all of it was water and it had a slightly brown tinge to it, signifying it may be rusted. So i tell him to replace the cap, and flush it, since I doubt it has ever been done on this car. all in all it totaled out to $100, which included an over needed engine flush as well. Thinking okay great now I’m left with $300 to use for tires and alignment which is likely to run over that.

As the wallet gets thinner

Sunday rolls around and I have to get up by 9am, since in my previous days travels I made an appointment at the only Firestone available on Sundays. So I get there 45 min late but they still take me. I let them know the oil change doesn’t need to be done and to check the front end and do an alignment. So after waiting 2 hrs he comes out and is like okay the inspections done, and it was the alignment that was partially the cause of the pulling, but the bigger issues was the tires. I checked out the tires they had, and they did have a $99 special for smaller tires, so I wasn’t about to accept that. But since I was getting all this work done he’s hooked me up with a deal for 4 tires of the same size for $99. Now thinking $200 for the alignment, new tires, balancing and labor, was too good, I waited for the other shoe to drop, and sure enough it did. Apparently while the guy was doing the alignment he kept smelling antifreeze and not just from the over flow container, and upon further investigation discovered and nice crack along the radiator. Oh but wait it gets better. He runs the car for a little bit to show that it indeed was a leak, and the fan never kicks on.

So now, I have hardly any money for the week, but luckily I worked a 14 hrs day last week and expect a pretty hefty paycheck this Thursday. Unfortunate I also have to pay for driving School for the ticket I got a few weeks back, on top of trying to save another $400 for a new radiator. But I’m hoping I can get it fixed somewhere. But since this isn’t little, everyone knows everyone and there grandma SV I doubt there’ll be a place that could weld it without costing about the same as a new one.

I’m hoping this week gets better, but I expect it’ll only get worse, Murphy’s law!