As if Tuesday wasn't enough!

My friend Jim, who had sold me the van, seemed to have come up with a fantastic resolution to all my problems. Well, it started that way. He has a friend at a junk yard who offered to replace the catylitic converter and radiator at almost no cost. Great words to hear two weeks before Christmas.

I was there bright and early to drop off the van and 7AM and had made arrangememnts with work for some time off. This is where we being to hit that whole “Best laid plans” area. It ended up by 11:30, with enough time for Jim to get to where he had to be for the day and when I was supposed to be back at work and the van still wasn’t ready. I decide to leave them to their work and I’d return to mine. The only bright side to the day was that the local bus service was running free for the holidays. I was saving a dollar!

Wait for it. You’ll soon see why this was a high point to the day.

I got back to work and waiting until 3PM to check on the progress. The guy there said he had discovered it was not the converter but the fuel pump. This was a part which had to be ordered. That, of course put it outside of the “almost no cost” department. That wasn’t, by itself, all bad. Then I called the bank’s automatic teller line to double check my balance and it told me I was overdrawn by over $500.

Hmmmm, let’s look at that calendar again! 12 days left!!!!!

What had happened was my other account had been overdrawn and they grabbed the money from my main account. On top of that they continued to let me use the one active account including getting cash out of it that very morning to cover the auto repairs. Wouldn’t it have made a little more sense to cut me off when it was already overdrawn instead of allowing me to dig myself in deeper? When I check it it the daybefore when I was planning these expenses, the money was there. And now…..BAM!

I’m weighing my options and how I can recover from this on time for Christmas. It will be a lean Christmas but I am trying to get through it without having to crawl to one of my sisters from some help. It’s been years since I had to do that and my pride is working very hard to keep me from groveling.

I finally picked the van up tonight and it is running better. I am going to take it on a test run over some distance and see what happens. Of course, I’ll keep it within the 90 mile AAA radius.

Just in case.