I have come to the conclusion that computer geeks such as Eddie and myself are not allowed to have vehicles.

Yesterday I left work in the afternoon, checking the level of the coolant before I left the store parking lot. Roughly 45 minutes later I was once again stuck on I95-S, overheated. It turns out that it was a false alarm, however, because I hadn’t screwed the radiator cap on tightly enough. Once the engine had cooled off and the coolant was refilled, everything was all hunky-dory for the rest of the night, until the drive home when the transmission decided to go and kick the bucket. We drove it to WalMart to drop Eddie off at work, I took Mom’s truck for the day, and Eddie and Mom drove it most of the way home from WalMart before it overheated once again and they left it at a local garage for a few hours. The two of us went back up to the garage before dinner to drive it back to Mom’s house, and it overheated and wouldn’t go any faster than about 30mph and is at this very moment sitting in the parking lot at the baseball field near my mother’s house because it just wouldn’t make it the entire 3 miles back to her house from the garage.

There goes our new apartment fund.

I dropped Eddie off at work this morning, and since the highway was jammed heading into the city I decided to walk around the store. I got no less than 4 comments on my homemade dress, and only one of those was from my mother. I walked through the fabric and craft department and found a fuckload of black stretch velvet that I think I could use if it wasn’t too bulky (I didn’t pull it down to really look at other than checking the price), and ended up buying another sheet set - this time in lavender - to make another dress tomorrow. I also picked up some slightly-shiny capri-length leggings, because I’m still a fat chick who doesn’t like her thighs to rub together, and they look pretty snazzy under the dress. Very 80’s.

The car got fixed this morning. Eddie walked up to the gas station shortly after their service center opened and got them to put some new terminals on. Cost us $26, and most of that was labor.

So I go outside to eat my lunch today, and hop into the car to enjoy my usual snack of Chex mix. I sit down, put the key in so I can listen to some tunes, and get nothing. Now, I’m already in a somewhat pissy mood because of the idiots we’ve been dealing with at work all morning and my anxiety is running high this week because I’ve worked almost a week straight, and thus a dead battery was quite high on my list of “shit I don’t need to deal with right now“.

Naturally, no one in the store can give me a jump because no one has any cables, and the ones that Eddie swears are in the car are no where to be found. I pluck up every bit of courage in my body and waltz across the street to the skeevy car dealership and see if one of their service guys can jump the car, and one seems more than willing to give it a shot. We pop the hood and immediately detect the problem: a huge mass of seafoam green…. um…. stuff covering the terminal. After much wiping and scraping and prodding at the stuff, a load of sparks confirming that the battery does indeed have a full charge, it’s determined that we need new terminals. The service guy (and his coworker who came over to check things out) jury-rig things to get the car started and I drive it home, pissing and moaning the entire time about how one can be under the hood of the car twice a week to put more oil in and not know that the pulsating, Cthulu-like green shit encompassing half the battery is bad.

Ok, so maybe it wasn’t pulsating, and it had less tenticles than Chtulu, but it was still bright green, ok?

At this moment, the car is at the gas station I think. It runs fine once you get the terminal and the cable to touch, but that’s quite an inconvenience. It’s getting looked at, and the service guys near work were nice enough to give me a spare terminal they had laying around the garage, but didn’t know if it was one that would be usable in our car.

For now, my big plans are to get the car running, and maybe to do the hem on my cute dress, since it’s slightly uneven (but rather unnoticable with its hankerchief style). I might just trim the uneven bits off and leave it as is - since it’s just t-shirt material it rolls up on itself a little. I want to go buy some more material so I can make something to wear for graduation.

They really need to update the signage in this city. Instead of the current “Welcome to Historic Pawtucket” signs they’ve got, there should be a giant sign off of exit 27 on I-95 North that says “Welcome to Pawtucket - where the theives are complete idiots”. Seriously.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that Eddie and I don’t keep the car as clean as it could be. There’s two boxes of yarn in the back seat, as well as my lab coats and pharmacy books. There’s assorted bags from stores, mostly filled with scraps of packaging that hasn’t made it into the trash bin yet. There’s also a few hundred dollars worth of CDs and things in there as well, which are in the center console as usual.

So this morning we get into the car, and I notice that there’s more crap in the front seat than normal, but I don’t give it much thought because I figure that maybe it’s just my yarn bag shifted at some point during the night. That is until Eddie said, “Well, someone was in here last night,” and pointed out that the center console was open and my CD case was missing. At that point I’m mourning the loss of not only my own CDs but several of Eddie’s that I’d put in the case to listen to when I was working for Cingular, until Eddie starts rummaging through the back seat and notices that whoever got in looked through the trunk as well by pulling the back seats forward. He moves a winter coat and viola, my CDs are found.

Whoever got in took absolutely nothing. All the CDs seem to have been untouched - everything loose in the console, the CD case, and the visor CD holder - as well as all my books, the tools and jackets in the trunk, and the chairs and $10 radio we use at the drive-in. While it might not be a helluva lot, it certainly would have fetched a decent amount of money at a yard sale or something, enough to buy some booze at the liquer store on the corner anyway. I guess they just didn’t like my taste in music.