Well, I was on an 18-day streak until yesterday. I just didn’t have time to write, but there’s a perfectly good explanation for that.

Many, many months ago I told Dad that we needed to get the brakes on the car looked at because when it’s coming to a stop, you can feel the brakes jerking. I know nothing about it but it was like it would catch and then slip, catch and then slip, until the car finally stopped. Now, I have had the brakes go out on me back in 2008 at an intersection and it was scary as hell! I didn’t especially want that to happen again! Anyway, I kept telling him, week after week, for months that this needed to be taken care of before it got worse. Months and months before that I was reminding him that the car was due for an oil change, according to the sticker they put in the window. If procrastination was a sport, Dad would get a gold medal.

He finally decided to make an appointment. Well, that was last week and they changed the oil and wiper blades as we requested but the brakes were so messed up that we had to bring the car back in…yesterday morning at 8 a.m. Which meant we had to get up at 6 a.m. to be ready to leave by 7 a.m. I am not much of a morning person, especially that early!

So, we sat there in the Ford place and while sitting there I started feeling really crappy. I had been having sinus issues for a week or so but yesterday, it turned into more. More on that later. They finally finished the car around 2 p.m. They replaced the wiper fluid mechanism that was damaged during a hail storm a few months back and there was an issue with the fuel injectors and some other shit I know nothing about. Anyway, the cost of everything that had to be done was $2,273!! The brakes are what did it. I asked Dad if perhaps if they had been looked at months ago, would it not have cost so much? He agreed, and then to my surprise, he admitted that it was his own damn fault.

This whole “cost too much money” episode reminds me of several times in the past when Dad procrastinated to the point that it cost him more in the end to fix the problem. Like the slow leak under the kitchen sink… I told him I thought it was the porcelain sink rusting around the drain. Of course, being a woman I don’t know a Goddam thing and he said that just because there’s rust doesn’t mean it’s leaking. Duh, right?

Ok, fast forward, the leak got worse and it became obvious that the leak was indeed due to the rust around the drain because we could now see the damn hole! It cost him over $400 to replace the sink, the plumbing, and the bottom of the cabinet underneath the sink. He and my son did the work so there were no labor costs involved. That was a long time ago so you can imagine the cost these days! Another time, and this will blow your freaking mind, we had a small hairline crack in the bottom of our fiberglass tub/shower unit. I told Dad we needed to find some kind of glue or epoxy or something before the crack got worse. In Walmart, I happened to find a glue made especially for fiberglass tubs. It was $10 and Dad said, “That’s too much money for glue and it probably won’t work anyway.” Okay….so let’s not do anything at all, right? Well, that’s what we did and that crack turned into a little dime-sized hole. Then it grew into a 3-inch hole!

Dad told us all (my kids were not yet out on their own) to just straddle the hole when we take a shower. Holy crap! What about all the water draining out of that 3-inch hole and going under the tub? I don’t even remember how long we showered like that but it was a long time before Dad decided to replace the tub. He also had to replace the flooring under the tub, for obvious reasons. That whole project cost him around $700 and it was he and my son doing the work. That was back in the 90s, so that’s cheap compared to what it would cost now! But that glue would have been a cheaper solution if used right away! About a year after he replaced the tub/shower unit, it got a tiny crack in the bottom AGAIN! I told him it was probably caused by not being level but of course, what the fuck do I know? Anyway, I went out and got that damn glue that cost a little more than it did when I pointed it out to him before, and I brought it home. I followed the instructions and sealed that crack! It’s been years now and it hasn’t changed. No leaks.

Back to the Ford place now. By the time we left, I was exhausted and felt like “pounded pig shit” as we say in my house. We stopped for some Mexican food because we hadn’t eaten all day but I didn’t enjoy it at all. I just wanted to sleep because I felt so awful. Dad just got over the worst part a couple of days prior from the same thing and now I had it. When we got home, I fed my furbabies, changed my clothes, and hit my lift chair. I tried to sleep but I had the chills. I was so cold! For 2 hours I tried to sleep it off but I never did get warm enough to sleep. I tried to work on my jigsaw puzzle later but I just couldn’t concentrate. My head was throbbing. I ached from head to foot, especially my shoulders from tensing up while I was trying to get warm, I think. I laid back down in my chair and took my temperature. It was 103.4 – no wonder I was feeling so crappy! I finally got my fever down to normal around 10pm but I still had that damn headache! I got to thinking it was probably from caffeine withdrawal because I hadn’t had but a glass of iced tea with lunch. I didn’t dare drink any coffee before we left the house or even on the drive. My bladder isn’t very cooperative these days.

So here I sit with coffee in hand, hoping the caffeine takes the headache away! It has helped but I still feel like crap. Dad says he has a sore throat and that he’s on the mend and I’m glad for that because he’s 86 years old and doesn’t need to end up in the hospital. I don’t want to be in the hospital, either but I’ll be back to normal, whatever that is, in a few days.