Damn. The coolant and oil pressure lights went on in my car today so I took it to the mechanic; the bad news is that it’s going to take two or three hundred dollars to fully diagnose the problem; the worse news is that the cheaper of the two things it could be (given what they’ve discovered so far) is a cracked head-gasket which will run a grand or so to replace. If it’s the other thing, a cracked engine block, it would be about three to four grand, if I even wanted to bother. The car’s a 96 Saturn with 90,000 miles on it, so while by-and-large I feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth on it….I sure didn’t want to replace it for a few more years.
Which means, among other things, I’m probably not taking any expensive vacations this summer. I almost booked a trip to Vancouver yesterday, and was trying to plan the dates to visit my family in the Bay Area in August, and now I’m thinking I can’t really afford it. Maybe if it was just the head-gasket, and I wanted to gamble on nothing else going seriously wrong for a while…sigh. It’ll be a few days at least before I know. Luckily, I don’t need the car every day, but it’s sure going to make shopping inconvenient. How inconvenient was driven home to me when I got home at 11:00, realized that I was completely out of certain necessities (the heaviest of which was kitty litter), and had to lug it back from the nearest 24-hour Rite Aid on foot.