I think I've remarked before that the part of not-being-married that I find most difficult is the "logistics" part. (As in: you need to be somewhere. Your car is not working. It is early in the morning so you do not wish to call a friend and bother them).

Yeah, logistics issues.

Sunday, my car started making an odd chattering noise. I thought, "Fan belt is going" and made a mental note to run it out to the shop (I had originally planned to do that after piano lesson today; this is the night the shop I use is open late).

Yesterday, driving home, I stopped at a red light. The car died.

First, the battery light came on.
Then, the oil light came on.
Finally, the engine light came on.

Now, a reasonable person - or perhaps someone with greater experience with unreliable cars - would immediately have tried restarting. But my experience with this car is: when something goes wrong, it's REALLY wrong. (See: transmission replacement of summer 2006).

So I mildly freaked out (the fact that I had spent the prior couple of hours wrestling one of the school's 15 passenger vans out on our pockmarked roads didn't help; I was already pretty stressed out). Jumped out of the car, started trying to figure out what towing company wouldn't rip me off too badly. And whether I could get it towed out to the shop and just LEAVE it there, even though they'd likely be closed for the day by the time it arrived.

Finally, some guy stopped and told me if I could get the car into neutral, he could push me into the nearest parking lot.(Actually, first, he told me, "If the transmission's shot, you may be able to still back up. Try that.")

I was able - after the car sat for several minutes - to restart it and get home. (And it only took 20 minutes for me to stop shaking).

So I took it out to the shop this morning (they open at 7:30) and described the symptoms (it stalled once on the way out there but I got it restarted). Then I had to get one of the mechanics to drive me to work. And they're very nice about it and all, but I can't help wishing a little I had someone willing to do that for me.

(As for getting back out to retrieve the car, I'm trying to repeat the mantra "we will cross that bridge when we come to it" over and over again. I'm already in gear to walk home and walk to my piano lesson if necessary; I wore slacks today so I could wear shoes that wouldn't kill my feet to walk in).

They're supposed to call me when they have the problem sussed out so I can decide whether to have it fixed or if it's (please God no) time to shop for a new car. (The car is nearly 10 years old but only has about 60K miles on it. Yes, I am a real homebody).

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it's one, or some combination, of these:

battery (I'm only on the second battery for the car)
fan belt (that would explain the chattering)
alternator (that would explain the unexplained dying)

I'm hoping it's not something really horrible like the whole electrical system is going. I've decided anything over $1000 is probably not worth it at this point, especially if more stuff is likely to start going wrong. (But I really do not want to start looking for a new car. Ugh. And what does a person in a one-car household do in the interim? Rent? Walk? I hate this.)

Also, I had to spend most of the evening last night messing with firewalls and adware removers. Somehow my home computer got infected with one of those $)(%*&$$ pop-up ad generating things. The really annoying thing was that it would open them in Internet Explorer and I use Firefox for browsing. My first thought was to uninstall IE, but then I was (a) afraid the program would transfer to Firefox and (b) there are a few sites (some of the University sites even) that are not totally Firefox compliant and I have to use IE if I use them.

I THINK I got the problem fixed (and darn but there wasn't a lot of adware that got slipped onto my machine) but what a time-suck and an annoyance.

If it's not fixed, when and if I get my car back, I guess I'll take it out to the good computer guys who helped me when Communicomm was being unhelpful with the cable modem set up, and pay them $60 or whatever it is to do a scan and clean.