{"id":295,"date":"2007-08-28T12:54:00","date_gmt":"2007-08-28T16:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/?p=295"},"modified":"2007-08-28T12:54:00","modified_gmt":"2007-08-28T16:54:00","slug":"can-i-scream-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/2007\/08\/28\/can-i-scream-now\/","title":{"rendered":"Can I scream now?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The kid thinks there should be a room, either in your house or at work or something that&#8217;s completely soundproof where you can go and just shriek like a banshee when the need arises. I would love such a room. Or I could do what Sally Bowles does and wait under a train bridge and shriek when a train passes.<\/p>\n<p>Whatever works.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m having a bad day\/week\/summer. Money&#8217;s been so damn tight and we&#8217;re just sort of &#8216;getting by&#8217; until things pick up this fall. But yesterday at lunch, I go home, fix my mac &#8216;n cheese, head back and when I turn the key in the ignition, my car splutters, coughs and dies. Cough cough, splutter splutter, die die. It&#8217;s 95 degrees out, I&#8217;m panicking because now I&#8217;m late getting back to work, and all of my fears about &#8216;getting by&#8217; come crashing down on me when I realize I&#8217;m going to have to pull money out of my ass to fix the damn car.<\/p>\n<p>So I call my long-suffering Grampa. Bless him. He patiently listens to me as I freak out about what could possibly be wrong with the car and offers his opinion on what it could be as I wait for my long-suffering coworker to leave work, brave the heat and come pick me up.<\/p>\n<p>So once I get back to work, I open the phone book and look at auto repair shops. I&#8217;m bewildered as to who to call, who seems trustworthy, who won&#8217;t rip me off&#8230; and in the end I call a dealership who&#8217;ve been nice to me in the past when I had minor fixes.<\/p>\n<p>Never again.<\/p>\n<p>They swing by, pick up my keys and tow my car down there. Grampa picks the kidlet up from school and me up from work and we&#8217;re carless for the evening. No big. Not like I had anything to do. But it&#8217;s funny how, when you have a car, staying in is no big. When you don&#8217;t have a car, you think of a million things you need a car to go do. But we muddled through.<\/p>\n<p>Grampa picked us up this morning and dropped me at work and Shan at school and I promised I&#8217;d let him know what the auto guys said when they call.<\/p>\n<p>And now I&#8217;m *really* wishing I&#8217;d taken it somewhere else. They called. My fuel pump was shot and the entire &#8220;module&#8221; needed to be replaced. Cost? $845-ish. EIGHT HUNDRED AND FORTY-FIVE DOLLARS! That is single-handedly the largest amount of money I&#8217;ve ever had to pay for a car repair. Ever. E-VAR. The fuel pump &#8220;module&#8221; alone was $505. Haven&#8217;t these people heard of open source? \ud83d\ude41 <\/p>\n<p>Anyway, I asked about trading my beloved car for something else and was told my car isn&#8217;t worth much anymore and any car they could sell me would be crap.<\/p>\n<p>So my beloved grandparents, who are the best at soothing their hysterical granddaughter said they would dip into savings and cover the cost and that I can work out a repayment plan with them. I&#8217;m alternately relieved and guilty. I hate, HATE that they had to bail me out of a fix. I know they don&#8217;t want me to feel guilty and that it&#8217;s all good and paying them back will take a while but they know I&#8217;ll do it but it&#8217;s not doing much to improve my stress levels.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve got my car back and it&#8217;s running fine and all. But what a price \ud83d\ude41 I&#8217;m going home tonight, I&#8217;m curling up on my bed, having a good cry, then a cup of Earl Grey followed by fuzz therapy from Spooky and some Shannon-time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The kid thinks there should be a room, either in your house or at work or something that&#8217;s completely soundproof where you can go and just shriek like a banshee&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}