. . . The weekly virtual “gratitude jar.”
This week, I’m expressing thanks for . . .
Well, it’s just been kind of hard recently.
I know I shouldn’t complain. There are so many people worse off than us. And my uncle just had a major health scare (fortunately, he seems to be feeling much better now). . . . But we’re getting tired of trouble, expensive trouble.
At the end of June, as we drove home around 9 p.m. after spending Father’s Day in Columbia, my elderly car died on US 63. (I posted about it earlier.) It was a late night as we had to have the car towed the rest of the way to Jeff City, and then, having been dropped off at the (closed) repair place, we had to wait for the one taxi cab in town. It was not marked; it was just some guy’s smoky-smelling SUV. This is a taxi? Anyway, he was pleasant enough. We didn’t get home until about midnight.
The very next day, as we were driving back to Columbia on the very same highway, Sue’s front right brake calipers went bad, and we pulled off at the very same place on the highway. The wheel was sizzling hot. So, we called AAA again and got another tow.
That’s right: we got two tows, for two different cars, from the exact same spot, within a single twenty-four-hour period.
Some of the good parts: We have AAA. We have AAA Plus. We were not physically injured. We have cell phones that work (you young things, try to imagine how much of a pain it was when your car broke down in the middle of nowhere, and cell phones didn't exist). The truck was able to be fixed within a few days. The service rep at our local Honda dealer, where both cars were taken for service, offered us a car to rent, which was very convenient.
But back to the complaining . . .
Trying to buy a car is a bitch in 2022, especially if you’re in a small town. In a nutshell: The available used cars are crappy and overpriced. Few in the Honda dealer’s lot are Honda Certified; in fact, few on the Honda dealer’s lot are even Hondas. As for new cars, they are simply not available. We find ourselves in the lucky/unlucky position of being able to purchase a new car, to make a sizeable down payment, and have excellent credit, being preapproved for a lowest-interest loan, and yet . . . there’s nothing to buy. So we paid a deposit and are on a waiting list. It will probably be months before our car is manufactured and arrives in Missouri. Meanwhile I can only dream about having a lovely, reliable, sexy new car.
Yes, the above image is shamelessly stolen from the Honda website. Why wouldn't they want someone like me sharing their lovely promotional photo of their top-selling sedan in its most desirable color this model year?
More complaining: the local Honda dealer appears to have done some kind of bait-and-switch on us, promising us that if we paid a deposit before someone else did, we’d be able to put our names on a car that’d been ordered by someone else who’d declined the vehicle, thus getting us ahead of the usual schedule . . . But then that evaporated. I think our young sales associate offered us something he wasn’t allowed to offer. They won’t tell us he screwed up, but that’s apparently what he did. I’m allowed to be angry about that, right? He told us we’d get “that cool Sonic Gray Metallic, by early August, instead of September!”; then he called a few weeks later and said “in early or middle September, maybe, and it’ll be white!” Wait, what? No!
It’s a long story. This crazy COVID economy is most of the problem; computer chips from China are in scant supply, so production is way down. The Honda company, the factory, has to allocate the few cars that are dribbling out of its assembly lines to all the dealers on the continent, and guess what? The rinky-dink small-town dealers like the one in this town are getting the dregs. They’re getting the black and the white cars. I think they’re getting just one or two a month.
Meanwhile, the big-city dealers that sell more cars in a bigger market get many more cars from the factory, and they get a greater variety of colors. So this is why we ended up putting a deposit and placing an order from a St. Louis dealer, too. Geez. It this crazy, or what? It’s about like what happened with us trying to get a new refrigerator this winter.
Again: It could be far worse. We have a neighbor who uses a riding lawn mower as his principal mode of transportation. Our problems are laughable to him. Our problems are “First World problems.” I know it. And we are so lucky that my parents, who are doing much less driving these days, are glad to let us use their car for out-of-town excursions.
THEN, with the one-car situation kind of settling in, Sue and I were driving back home from a trip to Columbia this past Monday, and AGAIN her truck started acting weird. It was making a funny noise. The engine heated up. The battery light came on. The power steering went out. We pulled over, again, on US 63 again, again near Hartsburg (actually, this time it was along the shoulder near the Boone and Callaway county line). (I’m starting to hate Hartsburg!)
Called AAA. Again. By this time, Tyler, the smiling young tow-truck driver for Kendall’s, knows us. “Oh, yeah, when they said it was a purple pickup, I knew it was you!” . . . Again, I’m glad we have AAA. Again, I’m grateful that the repair place was able to fix it. It was a malfunctioning pulley on the serpentine belt, and a broken serpentine belt. (This time, since we’re kind of honked off at the local Honda-everything, we had it towed to Telle Tire, and though they were busy, and we’d dropped it off after-hours without an appointment, they fixed it within a few days, and it was okay.) But I’m not liking this car stress.
Okay, next topic: Did I mention we’re finally getting a new roof and gutters? Supposedly? Yeah. We’re lucky that insurance is covering it, considering the damage occurred in the hailstorm in late March 2020, but fortunately it’s covered, and we have a surprisingly low deductible. But it’s stressful, anyway. We’ve been expecting them all month. We recently found out that the reason for the delay is the combination of our steep roof and the super-f-ing-hot weather we’ve been having. The roofing company doesn’t want the shingles and other materials to be compromised because of the heat. Not to mention the safety of their workers . . . And yeah, we have a sense of PTSD regarding the roofers. When we had the current roof installed in 2006, we unfortunately had a clown/ex-con/ripoff company rip us off. (You might remember our sunporch disaster, thanks to them.)
So we approach this roof work with trepidation. How can we not? This has been the biggest problem with owning this old house: We’re not fix-it people. We’re not carpenters, electricians, plumbers, roofers. And we have a hell of a time finding people to a) do the work, and b) trust to do it right.
Then, Tuesday, the day after Sue’s recent truck incident, and while it was being repaired, we discovered that one of our central air-conditioning units was making a funny sound, like it was straining. The coils had frozen up to the point where we were seeing frost on the outside of the unit. We turned off the system, and the thing defrosted, and we worried. It’s a 21-year-old system, and the maintenance folks have been telling us in recent years that it has a 15-year lifespan.
Fortunately, our annual scheduled a/c maintenance was only two days later, so that service call was covered by our contract . . . but unfortunately, the news was grim. The unit isn’t worth fixing; any fix would require retrofitting the coolant system for a different type of coolant, since the kind our system uses is no longer available . . . and any fix they did would still be a band-aid, as the aging compressor is no longer operating very efficiently anymore . . . So, tomorrow, we’ll meet with a sales representative and see what kind of suggestions and offers they can make.
Of course, they’ll offer us a discount on replacing both systems at once (we have two systems, one for the first-floor apartment, one for the second). But who wants to buy two air conditioners and two furnaces at once? Yeah, it would be nice to have them all be new and identical. But, but . . .
And yeah, I'm glad we have a separate first-floor air-conditioning unit that's working fine, so we can kind of live on the first floor if we need to. And I'm glad we've had relatively cool temperatures this week. But it's going to get back up into the nineties this next week. Ugh, ugh, ugh. The service man said the company might be able to tide us through with some loaner window a/c units until our new a/c unit(s) are installed, in something like one and a half to two weeks.
But who wants to make these purchases when preparing to buy an new car at the same time? And do you know what our retirement investments have been doing recently? Ugh!
So, “Jar of Goodness.” I’m giving you a mixed review this week. We’re just feeling really stressed and tired.
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