Words... what do they all mean?

About a month ago, I walked out to the car one morning to take myself to work, only to discover that one of my wheels was gone. Stolen right off my car. What the hell? No other damage or theft, just apparently someone wanted/needed a Camry wheel. I filed a police report and an insurance claim, yadda yadda. The police are unlikely to do anything, since it wasn't a break-in, and since the cost of replacing said wheel and tire is less than my deductible, we'd end up paying out of pocket anyway. Grr. Luckily, my spare is full-size and not a donut. So we threw that on and carried on driving the car until we could save up enough to replace the spare.

Yesterday morning, kiwifruitbat and I are ready to head off on his birthday adventure (in another post), and discover THE SAME EXACT WHEEL MISSING AGAIN! This time they at least left the car on the jack. Thanks, assholes, that's real thoughtful of you.

Thank God mom had chosen to stay the night before and take the baby home with her in the morning instead of just taking him that night; she let us take her car so we were able to still do my "evil plot." If she hadn't been there, there's no way we could have made it in time and the entire day would have been shot.

But seriously, who steals a wheel off a car? JUST TAKE THE GODDAMN CAR. Other than Morgan's booster seat, there was nothing of value inside, and pretty much any damage incurred would be enough to total it out. But no, it's just a wheel. "Just" even though it's $100+ and even that's a big imposition on our budget.

On Saturday the 18th, while we were cleaning the old apartment, I got a call from Sac PD saying they'd found my car, and giving me the information of the towyard where it had been taken. The yard was only open on weekdays, though, so I called Steve on Monday to coordinate a time we could both go check it out and see if it was in fact recoverable (I had not yet deposited the check). Grandma drove me over there on Tuesday, and it turns out the car had been recovered on Friday (it was taken Wednesday night/Thursday morning), a mere seven blocks away, parked in an elementary school parking lot. Apparently all they had wanted was the blingy aftermarket taillights my uncle had installed before he gave the car to me. Thanks, Tom. Oh, and my dad's tools. But the car seat was still there; apparently they couldn't figure out how to unbuckle it, heh.

So Steve met us there and took pictures and typed figures into his laptop and determined that the car really is totalled. They broke the casing on the steering column in order to start the car, and because it's so old (1992) that part has been discontinued. So, I could have bought it back from the insurance company at salvage cost, but then _I_ would have had to pay for the repairs, and would no longer be able to carry full coverage on it. Which doesn't sound like that great a deal, despite the immediate convenience of actually having wheels to get me around town. So once home I conferred with my financial department dad and he agreed, so I went ahead and deposited the check Steve had given me, and let him know that's what we were doing. Boo for no more excuses to see him again. Even Grandma agreed that he was really cute. Oh, and he wasn't wearing his wedding ring that day, either. Hmm.

Eenyway, Popa loaned me his Jeep to get myself to work and Morgan to school in the meantime, and this past Saturday I went up to Amador County to poke around our favorite dealer's lot (honest, non-pushy people; how often can you say that about used car salesmen?) and see what might be in our price range (which Dad and I just happened to be in agreement about, without even mentioning it). I test drove a Focus and a Camry and despite that the Focus was _way_ cute and trendy (and blue!), I actually preferred the Camry. When I told sales_rep Brad (friend and acquaintance in the way people only are in small towns), he kind of grinned and said, "You should." So Dad and I went back up to his house, took Morgan and Rusty to the lake (Morgan wanted to swim in the water with him, and he wanted to chase the ducks), and thought about whether we wanted to do it or if we should look around in town. Eventually we both realized that no matter what anybody else in town had, it would be hard to beat that Camry, and plus we're unlikely to buy from anyone other than Brad, anyway. So we called Brad back and asked him to pull it off the lot, and yesterday, in an impressive feat of car-juggling, we managed to get me up there, buy my new car, wash Popa's car as a thank-you for loaning it to me, bring _both_ cars back down the hill, and get Dad home at the end of it.

So I now have my very own pretty green car. With four doors (my one real requirement), AIR CONDITIONING (Popa's didn't have it, and it's in the three digits here these days), and _much_ more gas efficient than either Popa's Jeep or my Blazer. Am a very happy mommy.

I love my insurance rep company.

8:30 am - car is found to be missing (what an odd phrase), call insurance and police to file claim/report.

10:00 am - claims rep named Steve calls with more in-depth questions for filling out claim, agrees to come by work so I can fill out paperwork and he can cut me a check for the value of my car minus my deductible.

2:00 pm - Steve shows up, gives me papers to sign, hands me a check. If and when the car is found, they will take care of it, bing bang boom, everything's all neat and tidy and wrapped up with a pretty bow. Everything in life should be this easy.

So yes, I'm feeling much better about this whole thing now. When I found my car missing, I was more worried about the whole process of reporting it and whatever else needs to happen, than the fact that MY CAR WAS GONE. Usually this is the kind of thing that would reduce me to tears and make me a depressed wreck for the rest of the day.

Amazing how a pair of blue eyes and a nice voice can fix things up, hm?

Alas, claims_rep Steve is married with four kids (one of whom is 3, like Morgan). Far too good to be true. Probably a Mormon, because he didn't seem that much older than me, and I don't know anyone else who marries as young and has kids as fast as Mormons do. *sigh*

In other news-that-was-bad-but-is-now-good: on Wednesday Dad and I went to Toys R Us to get the Princess bed for Morgan, but they were out, and the rest of the bedroom accessories (rocking chair, play table, toy chest) were slim pickings, too. Turns out they've discontinued that line and the next one doesn't come out until the end of September/early October. So the customer service gal called around to see if any other stores still had them out on the floor, and it sounded like the Elk Grove store might have some on a truck that was not yet unloaded. So today, Mom sics Grandma on tracking one down, and 'cause she's Grandma (who has supernatural abilities to find things, especially on sale. Also to get parking spaces near front doors. It's creepy), she finds it. The store on Greenback Blvd. has a bed _and_ a rocking chair _and_ a table _and_ a toy chest, all at 20% off 'cause they're on clearance.

Seriously, I think God just might love me today.

My car was stolen last night/this morning. I parked it in the back & closed the gate after I came home from dinner following a day full of ferrying boxes to the new apartment, and when I went to leave for work this morning, it was gone. Just gone. No glass on the ground, so I thought maybe I parked it on the street and just forgot that I had done so, but no car anywhere on the streets; I walked around my whole block.

It's not a great car, and since we were moving it was pretty much empty, but it still had Morgan's car seat (~$60) and a bag of Dad's tools he had brought down to help with taking things apart and reassembly and whatnot. Probably $100 in tools. I'm more mad about those two things than the car itself. Means we're down one vehicle this weekend, but since the boxes are mostly done and all that's left are the big furniture items, which wouldn't fit inside anyway, eh. And insurance says it doesn't cover things inside the car, unless they were attached. Damn I'm glad Mom and I didn't load up the back with boxes of my bedroom stuff last night. Geez. There's no such thing as coincidence, you know? Maybe this is a sign from God or something; new apartment, new life, new car (though the insurance estimate says the value of my car is only $1500, which is not even close to enough to buy another one). Sac Police Dept. says they have an 80% recovery rate, but *shrug* I'm not going to flip out if they don't find it. Probably the costs of towing and storage and getting me to wherever it is so I can recover it will be more than the car is worth, and the insurance people say that's all on them, so it's very likely that it would just be totalled out anyway.

Still. _Damn_ inconvenient and annoying.

ETA: Whoadamn, my claims rep was beautiful. *fans self*

Health is better:

Thank You! to all my well-wishers (and especially starfirenz for the energy boosts); I am feeling much better. I went to work today, only had to take Tylenol once in the morning and no headache all day long, even after it had worn off. I felt brave and so ate some potato salad for lunch, though my stomach went "Argh" in a way I wasn't sure at the time was more "Eep! Solid food for the first time in two days!" or "Blagh, I'm still sick!" Turns out it was more the former, as it decided at about eight this evening that it _does_, in fact, like the idea of solid food, and started rumbling at me in ways I have not felt since my second trimester. Had a meal bar and a bowl of cottage cheese and pineapple for dinner and it's quieted down nicely.

The only achy-icky thing left is a sore throat from the coughing, for which I foresaw and heeded Tanja's advice for "honey, honey and more honey" in my chamomile tea. Twist my arm, seriously.

Car is worse:

I found out the hard way today that my car does not have an indicator light for when my gas tank is nearing empty. I noticed that the needle on the gage, though, was drooping low as I was on my way to work, so I pull into a station and think I'm being a good kid by filling up before the light comes on (my dad tried to impart the wisdom of "refill at 1/4 of a tank," but it didn't take). But I reach into my purse and can't find my wallet. Ahh, shite. I _very_ carefully drive Morgan to daycare and myself to work, because I can't afford the ticket for driving without my license.

Turns out it had been fumes that got me into the parking lot at work, because as I went to pull out of my parking space at the end of the day, my car just _stopped_. Rarg. firey_fairy and I transfer Morgan's car seat to her car, and she drives me over to the daycare to pick her up, and also to a Kragen to buy a gas can, and then to a gas station to fill up said gas can (which I'd never done before, and so was a little awkward about). This is all on money borrowed from Linda, because I have no wallet. So we return to the office, I give Linda her change, we transfer Morgan _back_ to my car, and then Becca and I fiddle with the gas can until a nice man in the parking lot takes pity on us poor girls and shows us how it's done (though we _could_ have figured it out on our own; there were illustrated instructions and everything *wink*).

So I am now the proud owner of a two-gallon gas can, which is enough to get me from work to home, and from home to the Chevron a few blocks away (though I'm not sure how much farther), where I happily put $20 into my gas tank from the wallet I found - once I got home and enlisted ktbee's help in searching the living room - to be still in my purse.

*sigh*

Without backtracking too much and going into too many details in regards to my financial situation, let me just say that it's very messed up. Dad had offered to go with me to meet with the VP of his bank to see if the last name would cut me any slack there and allow me to open an account ('cause this Bank of Wal-Mart business of paying to cash paychecks and constantly buying money orders is fecking _ridiculous_). So an appointment was set up for Tuesday. Cool.

On Sunday, I have this headache that just won't quit. It feels like a food headache, so I eat, but that doesn't help. So I take some Tylenol, and that doesn't help either. It's the same on Monday while I'm at work. Then at about eight o'clock Monday night, I start feeling some other not-right signs. So I'm careful about what I eat for dinner and how much, and when I go to bed at midnight I'm not feeling any worse than that general not-right sense.

Well, three thirty in the morning I wake up and am violently ill, and again at 4:45. Bleh. Also some other lower abdomen issues. _Not_ driving an hour up the hill on a highway that is limited as far as availability of bathrooms goes. So I call up dad and the bank guy and cancel, which turns out not to be a big because the weather up there is crummy, anyway, and with me having one mostly-bald tire on my car it would have been bad driving anyway.

But the other thing dad was going to do was help me sort out all the stuff I have to do to transfer the car into my name and register it and all that jazz. So I decide to not make a _total_ waste of the day, seize some initiative, and go out to do it on my own. The major hitch there was that the car needed to be smogged. Normally this takes, like, fifteen minutes. It took them _two_hours_ for my car, because it has Issues with revving (I didn't even ask for an explanation, because it wouldn't make sense to me anyway). But it at least was finally clear, so I head over to a DMV branch, arriving fifteen minutes before closing time (thanks to the extra time at the smog test place), and luckily I picked the right branch because they had _tons_ of windows so the wait was very fast. Paid the money, got the sticker, all is cool. Except for the bald tire, the revving thing, a transmission leak... I _do_ appreciate my uncle giving me his car, I really do. I just wish it could have been, like, _fixed_ before he handed it over to me.

So on the sick thing, I do feel better today. Probably could have gone in to work but decided a day off in which I actually _rested_ would help me get better faster. Still had the headache and general body-wooziness from Tuesday and developed a nice (hopefully productive) cough, but at least the nausea and other was gone. And Tylenol worked tonight. Yay!

I seem to be shaking this much faster than ktbee is shaking hers, so maybe we don't have the same thing, after all. Hmm...

Tagged by moon_very_thin.

( Read more... )

6)  Now tag 7 people.

alphadsnz_fb
ratty
starfirenz
_steelphoenix_
telepwenktbee
squyd