Car Purchase Blues

Memorial Day weekend went well. Chris and I went out to Ruston to see Nacho, in my first trip with the new car. Got to hang out there and relax, as well as see Ben Hagar when he came through town on his way back to Alabama. Ben's done well for himself; working for a NASA subcontractor. Makes me wish I'd been able to find a job in engineering sometimes, instead of winding up in IT by default.

Looking back at the week, I guess the biggest thing that happened was that I've had my first unexpected car trouble. Wednesday morning, on my way to work, I noticed that my driver's window was down a crack. Tried to roll it up, without success, but it rolled down OK. Then it just kinda sank down some. When I got to work, I forced it up with my hands, but then when I left work, it had sunk all the way down into the door. I called the place where my old mechanic went to when his shop closed, but couldn't get it in until Friday. Fortunately, the rain we'd had on and off for the past week had stopped Tuesday, so I didn't have to find a way to block the window, and there's nothing worth stealing in the car.

So Friday I took it to the mechanic. It turned out the problem was a busted window regulator, which was $500 to fix. Hate having to pay the money, but it couldn't be helped. I had also been concerned that the high-beams wouldn't stay on, but it looks like that's just getting used to the new car controls; the car has auto-sensing headlights that come on when it's dark, and to keep the high-beams on you have to manually turn on the headlights.

In the coming week, I'll be taking the car to the dealer to have the auto-dimming rearview mirror fixed, and the front cupholder replaced. After that, hopefully I'll be done with repairs for a while.

In other news, Chris ended up staying with me for a couple days more than we expected. His trainer came down sick. I pray he starts getting somewhere on training, because I know he's really hurting for money. He's worked something like a week and a half in the past month and a half.

At work, they're changing how we're paid. I used to be paid bi-monthly; now they're going to bi-weekly, with a 1-week pay this coming week to synchronize things properly. It won't really affect me much, since I have slack in my budget (which is going towards saving for a house down-payment, now that the car is done), but I'll have to re-work my budget forms once I know what the hard numbers turn out to be.