a series of unfortunate events....

Hey all - I had some more tid bits I was going to add to that last post and over the weekend, the post material just kept multiplying, so here goes. Okay, so here's a series of unfortunate financial events. It begins last Sunday. A friend came over the evening to help me do my taxes. Ah yes that exciting time of year when we start to like the government because they give back some of our hard earned cash - and usually a pretty nice chunk. Well anyway, my taxes were really simple to do - we went through and then came to the point in the computer where it was calculating everything. The screen showed this clock with hands turning and we were staring spell bound at the screen in deep anticipation when the little number 32 popped up. Our jaws just dropped in bitter disappointment. Yep, that's right. While the rest of North America is buying cars and computer, I get to go out for supper. I did get a bit more from state, but nothing exciting. Okay, that was Sunday. Monday I went to work and came home for lunch. While home I decided to grab the mail and my cell phone bill was waiting for me. My cell phone bill which is normally about 55 bucks, I might add. I opened it up and to my... surprise is not the right term... shock and horror, I was greeted by the number 567.99! What in God's green earth is going on??? It somehow just messes with your sense of reality and stability to see such a thing! Being the brain that I am, I immediately picked up my cell phone and called Baton Rouge in the middle of the day. Anyway, I took the bill in to the cell phone place later in the day and it is in the process of being sorted out. It does appear that I was charged for many calls that I shouldn't have been. It's pretty sad when your tax refund can't even pay for half your cell phone bill. Okay, so THEN on Thursday I was headed to the Indy airport to pick up Dave. My car (which I have spent precious little on the last 4 years) was making a hideously loud noise which grew louder the faster I went. It basically sounded like it wanted to take off. I was talking to my roommate on the phone and started feeling really woozy and slurring my words and stuff. So I pulled over at a gas station and went in and called Keith, my mechanically minded brother in law. He said it sounded like I was probably leaking carbon monoxide into the car and asked if I drove over any curbs or such things recently. I sorta said something along the lines of yeah, that's a semi-regular experience for me, but there was an incident this past week when this curb just jumped out of nowhere and .... okay, so he told me to drive with the windows down to the airport which I did while still feeling a bit woozy and talking on the phone so I was a solid block of ice till I got there - quite late. So Dave and I tried to decide what to do and Keith advised not driving the car on to Cincy. So because Dave has triple A we ended up getting it towed for next to nothing. And got to Cincy after 3 A.M. Took the car to a mechanic the next day and to make a long story short, he found that a wheel bearing was very bad and needed to be replaced, but he could not find anything that was leaking any type of anything into the car. Oh, I should add that the car burned gas like there was no tomorrow on this trip. He could find no reason for that. So he suggest some more work that would cost a pile of money in addition to the $300 worth of work that he did on it. Which also meant that unless he's very wrong, we had the car towed and I drove with the windows down for no reason and who knows why I felt like passing out when I was in the car. Then today I was driving home and just enjoying making um... good time and watching Lucy's arrival time drop lower and lower when out of the blue... yeah, you can guess where this is going and I don't think I can type it out for you. But last time this happened, which was 5 years ago, I was working at the bank and had to get a money order there and consequently endure their taunting. So yeah, I this concludes my tale of tossing money to the wind. hopefully! At least I got to see Dave this weekend. As a sidenote, I was out for lunch today with the man who invented Always feminine products. You want my autograph now, don't you?