I will NOT play the "poor poor pitiful me" game....

My car broke down yesterday.

This, after having spent nearly $600 getting new tires, rotors and brakes. Sigh.

Oh and paying off Todd's car with a final payment of over $4000. Sigh.

My dad, who usually fixes whatever is wrong with my car, is out of town and as it is going to be friggin' COLD this weekend, I had the car towed down to their house this morning. Another $150 or so. But at least it's out of my company's parking lot.

This all started around 7:15am yesterday when I was heading up the hill to work. Just as I passed under C-470, the wind picked up wildly and my check-engine light flashed a time or two and then turned off. Then it happened again another 10mins later or so. The wind was INSANE so I figured it was just that my car was having to work so bloody hard against a head wind. It's not a totally unreasonable thing to think...you don't know how bad the wind was.

Well, when I went to leave the office to head to class (20mins late, mind you...I got my days mixed up in my head), I jumped in the car and....

Nothing.

Kate, she was trying so hard to start. She knows I'm good to her and I could tell she really wanted to start, but it just wasn't in her.

So I hopped back out of the car, slammed the door shut and ran back into the office to see if Chandra could take me to the Mills where Todd would eventually pick me up.

As I was on the phone with Todd explaining all the drama, I realized that in my haste, I had locked my keys in my car.

Awesome.

So Todd wound up coming all the way up to my office to get me and instead of going to class, took me shopping for a new party dress for the Christmas season, which I needed anyway. I got this super hot "Samantha from SATC" style dress which will look great with my new silver heels and Todd was so excited that he bought me yet another dress and some long silver gloves to wear to his company party with the SATC dress and silver heels. Woot!

So this morning, my co-worker BJ hears that my car is busted and offers to check it out for me to see if he can try to diagnose the problem prior to having my pops fix it.

Turns out, I have a cylinder misfiring, which has happened before. On top of that, when he looked at the engine, he discovered that a vacuum hose was disconnected and one of my spark plugs was just hangin' out in the engine, not really attached to anything. Bah. He thinks I might also need a new ignition module.

All of these things I've had to deal with in all my years of owning vehicles and three of those four things have happened with Kate, the current car.

So, two weeks before Christmas and $4700 down, this is probably the best thing that could have possibly happened to me.

But I suppose there is a bright side to it all.

I mean, I’ve been really lax with studying for my Spanish final on my own and I’ve been given some “forced” study time over the next couple days, which will be nice. It’ll also allow me to really enjoy the Christmas party tonight (Alice 105.9s “holiday hootenanny”) and Todd’s company party tomorrow night (it’s a 20s speakeasy style party, which I’m crazy excited about) without freaking out that I haven’t studied or need to study more. All-in-all, it’s okay.

It’s also kind of a slap in the face from the universe to remind me not to be so flippant with my/our money right now. We’ve been a little frivolous and this is kind of just a reminder that I’m not yet made of money so maybe it’s time to tighten the purse-strings ever so slightly until this economy of ours gets back on track…whenever that decides to happen.

Regardless, this whole car-breaking-down thing isn’t the WORST thing that could happen to us right now. It’s certainly not the most ideal thing, but way worse things could happen so I’m going to focus on the silver linings and not let it get me too down…