So it’s ten thirty at night, and I have both of the kids in the backseat and I’m driving to my friend Twila’s house so I can use some of her stamps to finish my scrapbooking project, when suddenly the car lets out the mechanical equivalent of a moan of exhaustion. All of the gages on my dashboard are going wonky. Apparently I am going zero miles per hour with zero rpms and the gas tank is rapidly fluctuating between full and empty. Thankfully, it rallies and continues plodding forward, although the check engine light of doom is glowing yellow, and I have no idea how fast I’m going.

I get my project finished and get back in the car praying to just make it home, which we do. Now, I am supposed to be driving away at eight the next morning to enjoy a day of touring the San Francisco Zoo and the Japanese Tea Garden because the first Wednesday of the month is free day for all of the city’s cultural places and free fits very well into my budget. Since it is almost midnight I leave Chris a note and go to bed.

The next morning we have no idea what’s wrong with the car. I call my Dad, who knows about stuff like this, and he offers the same solution that apparently my husband already checked the night before. That was the inexpensive solution, so I’m quite sad to see it go. Chris is pretty mechanically inclined (he does fix airplanes for a living, you know), so he drops twenty bucks on a manual for the piece of garbage car to troubleshoot it. You can’t look in these things before you buy them, so he gets home and looks in it and it doesn’t have anything in it under “My Gages Are Possessed”, so it was twenty dollars down the drain.

Chris says since the car is running it’s up to me whether or not I want to just head for San Francisco anyway. I have a healthy fear of being stalled on the Bay Bridge during rush hour, so I opt to stay home. Although this is the safe way to go, it makes me feel like a crummy mother because I’d spent the two days prior to this promising Jonas elephants and grandma and now I can’t deliver either.

Chris calls about twenty mechanics before he finds one who can take the car today. I start eating brownies because I’m stressed. Mechanics are expensive. I am broke. It’s a really bad combination. Chris takes the car in; I eat four more brownies. Chris returns and tells me that having the car diagnosed will be $120. That’s just to look at the darn thing, not even to fix it. I cram another brownie in me. The good news is, we have a mechanic who seems to know his way around a Dodge, unlike the last guy who fixed it and clearly didn’t know what he was doing. This guy is pretty sure it is one of two things. Scenario A is expensive and scenario B is somewhat less expensive, and the prices I was quoted didn’t include labor.

I take the estimated figure and try to rework our budget to cover the whole thing without going into hock. Normally this would be doable, but we’d already had one financial problem this month (yeah, and it’s only the fourth), and I’ve already tweaked the budget once, so we are going from Difficult to Are You Crazy? It works on paper, but in real life, it’s a bit of a joke.

A few brownies later we learn that it’s problem B, we also learn that it’s a quick fix and the initial $120 will cover the labor (Whew!).

So the car is fixed. I’ve eaten an entire pan of brownies. I am poorer. But I’m ok. Last night Chris called me from work and told me that he just found out he’d made an error in our favor last month and paid car insurance twice. So I was able to add that extra bit back into the budget and take things down a notch to Really Inconvenient, But Not Impossible.

So that’s my life. Broke then broker. It gets old.