Goodnight Daddy from Chixulub on Vimeo.
My ex emailed it from her phone last night when circumstances prevented my routine bedtime call. It's important, because it is easily the high point of the dark period since Monday evening's bike ride and Steak & Shake scene...
My car was in the shop for a mighty $1291 in repairs, for a start. This was true, actually, Monday. It just wasn't until late Tuesday that my mechanic was finished with the two radiator fans, the timing belt, water pump, and I'm pretty sure a heart-lung-liver transplant on my 97 Accord.
This right after my home's AC blower fan melted down to the tune of $547. Right on the heels of the $125 snaking of three (or more) pairs of Mo's underpants from the sewer line. And all this while my income has been cut by 20% for months—not that this decreased my child support, mortgage, or any other obligations along the way...
How could it be any worse? Jehovah! Jehovah!
Right?
So I'm on I-35 this morning driving a car that hasn't even been out of the shop for a whole day and I see wisps of steam? Smoke?
I pull over, pop the hood and find it's steam (that's good, I think, at least the fucker's not on fire). Green stuff is leaking all over my brand new, very expensive radiator fans. I call my mechanic, who dispatches a character I'll call Igor simply because I didn't get his name. Igor showed up in an old Buick Century that was a mobile testament to mechanical prowess. Only a wizard could keep this thing running. His wasn't quite the same year, I don't think, but it was basically the car my 97 Accord replaced.
Igor tried to tighten the hose clamp on the leak (where the radiator met hose, but to no avail. The bottleneck that comes out of the radiator was crumbling. I didn't know they could do that. A radiator is a device filled with boiling-hot fluids all the time, I thought they were made out of, I don't know, METAL or something. Nope, this one's plastic. And toast. Another $179 plus tax and tow.
Did I for just a moment wish I'd let that salesman push me back to the finance office when I test drove that Nissan Cube? No, not really. I love the Nissan Cube, it is the perfect automobile, my dream car (if they offered it in yellow anyway), but no. I have no desire to be on that awful TV show where they show the fat chick and the dirtbags repossessing people's cars. And since I can afford, presently, a car payment of about zero, that's where the whole Nissan Cube affair would end.
I've had plenty of humiliations in life: divorce, bankruptcy, being 39 years old and having to ask Mommy for help with bone-crushing car repair bills, but I've never had a car repo'd. I haven't had a car payment since I was 22, when I paid the last payment on my one ill-advised car loan, and consequently I've not been vulnerable to this one particular shameful experience.
It's not that I've totally embraced the Dave Ramsey Lifestyle or anything. I have a couple of credit cards, full ones. I have no emergency fund saved and see little opportunity to put one together. To hear Dave tell it, if I had an envelope with $1000 in cash hidden in my freezer or coat closet, all this shit wouldn't break. I can't prove the theory wrong since I've never in my life had anything that resembled this 'emergency fund.'
As the skit goes, where does this 'saved money' come from???
But anyway, lest you think this is all about appliance and car repair, it gets better. Well, worse, but I'm counting on schadenfreude to make this worth your time. Sincerely, I hope you enjoy my misfortunes because I can't. It's okay, laugh a little at the Lobster, I'll laugh at you when you're circling the drain. Depending on who you are, I probably already have.
Igor dropped me at work and had my car towed back. If you're not impressed he had this old Century running, check it out: the air conditioning even worked. Impressive for a car built before the invention of air conditioning.
My Dad (dropped me at the garage to pick up the car) offered to take me and Mo to dinner. My night for the girls this week but Em is at camp.
So we go into Bob & Dee's, a restaurant Mo has eaten at and enjoys. And she's loving on me like I'm the reason we're in there. And I order her the three piece fried chicken dinner, which has every single one of her favorite foods, and she's got her lemonade.
And she starts shouting. She cups her hand over her mouth to create and echo and, well, it's more like a bark than a shout. But it's fucking loud.
So I roll out the tried and true admonishments to use her quiet voice, and it's not even making a dent. I try a time out and she screams, and I mean a coach's whistle can't compete with this. So we box up the food and leave, and as a consequence I took away her favorite soundtrack to being in the car (the Jolly Rogers, which she refers to and asks for as the 'Silly Rogers') and the computer. As in, when we get home, no computer because you made bad choices and ruined dinner.
I know I could have stayed and eaten and let Mo ruin everyone's dinner, but I'm not an asshole. Well, not that kind of asshole anyway.
We get home and I hit the garage door opener and nothing. Then I notice the house looks eerily dark.
Now, I mentioned above I've had a few unexpected expenses lately, right? And I've been on 32 hour weeks for a few months, so money would be tight anyway. I paid my electric bill on the way to work today because today was the cutoff day if I didn't. And because I only last night had enough money deposited to cover that check.
So I figured they had cut off my power before anyone checked the drop box and I was screwed. But I tried the after hours number trying to think of an angle that would get them to turn the power on at 7:00 p.m. My CPAP, my autistic daughter, the fact that you can't live by candlelight with a child who can't abide a lit candle (they're for blowing out) and who likes to eat candles.
Fortunately, everybody's power was out. Yay! It was a fallen tree and a messed up doo-hickey. Driving around, killing time (the car was much easier to share with Mo than an unlit, un-air-conditioned house), I even saw the linemen make the final vital repair: placement of a doo-hickey on a thingy up the pole. I saw a spark and the cherry-picker came down and I asked them if that meant the power was back on and they said yes.
I love those guys. And envy them their completely recession proof jobs.
All the while we were in the car, Mo asked for the Silly Rogers. And I repeated, over and over, 'No, you made bad choices and wouldn't find your quiet voice. Your bad choices ruined dinner, no Silly Rogers, no computer.' After an hour and a half, I think it almost sunk in. She tried to turn on the computer, first chance when we got home of course. I'd locked up the power chord, so nothing doing.
I'm aware, by the way, that some of the stuff I'm bitching about here is the result of my own bad choices...
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