my rough day

I had a ROUGH day yesterday!

As background, my parents gave us their old van, and we have to get it changed over to Maryland registration/titling/etc. Yesterday I went to have it inspected, which I figured would end up being an easy peasy thing because it had just passed inspection in West Virginia two months ago... So you can imagine my dismay when the Toyota service man came back to me with a minor problem (rusty battery terminals) and a major problem (replacing the left front inner tie rod, which made us also need an alignment)... It came out to $600 worth of "fixing" our car for the state inspection, instead of the $75 that I had been prepared to spend on getting it inspected! Yikes! I freaked out because we do NOT have that much extra money lying around in our bank account, and I started having a heart attack trying to figure out how to pay it. (I guess it's a good sign that my credit card doesn't quickly come to my mind as a solution.) Thank goodness they at least had all of the parts in stock so that it could be fixed that afternoon.

Because the car was going to be several more hours to be fixed, they offered me a free rental car, which I suppose was a bit of a consolation considering how much money they were stealing from me... I decided to go ahead and get my grocery shopping done, since I had been planning to do that after the inspection, and then just hang out at my house until they called me to tell me the van was ready. I drove 30 minutes north to go to the Sam's Club near our house, and when I had my groceries, headed 5 minutes back to our apartment.... at which I discovered that I didn't have my house keys. (I had about $30 worth of refrigerated food, since this is Sam's Club we're talking about.) Since I don't know any of my neighbors and don't have any friends in the state of Maryland, and since my husband works at a place in which he can't bring in his cell phone during the day, I couldn't leave the groceries with anyone! The only solution I could think of was to drive down to the Toyota dealership, pray that the van was ready, and, if so, swap the groceries into it and come back. But it wasn't ready when I got there and still had another hour to go... So I had them bring me my house key, at which point I drove 30 minutes back to my house, dropped off the groceries, jumped back in the rental for a 30 minute drive back down to the dealer. My van was finally ready, so I got in that and headed back home (again, 30 minutes).

I drove a total of 3 hours yesterday. I could have been almost back in WV by then! All I could think of as I was driving here and there was that the perfect end to the day would be either 1) crashing the rental car into something or 2) getting a speeding ticket (I was going about 10 over on my third trip down seeing as how ticked off I was!). Thank the Lord that neither happened...