Can I scream now?

The kid thinks there should be a room, either in your house or at work or something that'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.

Whatever works.

I'm having a bad day/week/summer. Money's been so damn tight and we're just sort of 'getting by' until things pick up this fall. But yesterday at lunch, I go home, fix my mac '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's 95 degrees out, I'm panicking because now I'm late getting back to work, and all of my fears about 'getting by' come crashing down on me when I realize I'm going to have to pull money out of my ass to fix the damn car.

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.

So once I get back to work, I open the phone book and look at auto repair shops. I'm bewildered as to who to call, who seems trustworthy, who won't rip me off... and in the end I call a dealership who've been nice to me in the past when I had minor fixes.

Never again.

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're carless for the evening. No big. Not like I had anything to do. But it's funny how, when you have a car, staying in is no big. When you don't have a car, you think of a million things you need a car to go do. But we muddled through.

Grampa picked us up this morning and dropped me at work and Shan at school and I promised I'd let him know what the auto guys said when they call.

And now I'm *really* wishing I'd taken it somewhere else. They called. My fuel pump was shot and the entire "module" needed to be replaced. Cost? $845-ish. EIGHT HUNDRED AND FORTY-FIVE DOLLARS! That is single-handedly the largest amount of money I've ever had to pay for a car repair. Ever. E-VAR. The fuel pump "module" alone was $505. Haven't these people heard of open source? :(

Anyway, I asked about trading my beloved car for something else and was told my car isn't worth much anymore and any car they could sell me would be crap.

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'm alternately relieved and guilty. I hate, HATE that they had to bail me out of a fix. I know they don't want me to feel guilty and that it's all good and paying them back will take a while but they know I'll do it but it's not doing much to improve my stress levels.

I've got my car back and it's running fine and all. But what a price :( I'm going home tonight, I'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.