Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Murphy's Law

I know, delinquent blogger...it's been more than a week. More than two to be fair. But at least one of those was spent in total chaos. The proverbial Murphy came to visit, and stayed for a week.

In my last post, I mentioned tangentially:

...on Friday we discovered that due to a clerical error at the DMV, our plates came up surrendered, a fact explained to us by the very nice cop who pulled Justin over and confiscated our plates. Not fun. Now we expect to have quite the adventure trying to get it all straightened out and getting new plates for our car.

Right now, we're just lucky to have a backup vehicle (THANK YOU GRANDPA) otherwise we would be totally up the river. Go figure it happened on the President's Day Weekend so we can't even start to straighten it out until Tuesday morning.


Well, it turns out that was only the tip of the iceberg.

Friday night (in a bit of shock after the nice officer confiscated our plates from car #1) we took car #2 to our optical appointments, which we were running late for.

Which means on Saturday, when we went to go shopping, the battery was dead (yep - I *still* cannot remember to turn my lights off...) and we had to jumpstart the car. Minor details, easily done. (Since I so often do this, we own a pair of jumpers, and a car doesn't have to have plates to jump start a battery).

Sunday and Monday, as I recall, were unblemished by Murphy. Ironically, I had to cancel my oil change appointment on car #1 for Monday, because I couldn't drive it the mile to the shop with no plates. On the bright side, Mom, Jimmy and boo came down to visit for the night, and we had a loverly evening visiting.

Then Tuesday hit, Murphy was back.

Plan: Jus goes to work with car #2 at 7am for scheduled data collection and returns by 8am. We both then take car #2 to the DMV to get plates straightened out for car #1.

Reality: Jus leaves the front door at 7am, only to return 10 minutes later. The transmission won't engage on car #2. Now we have 1 car with no plates, and 1 car with no transmission. Fantastic.

Thankfully, mom and Jimmy were still about, so Jimmy drove Jus to work and back and I got everything together for the DMV (and made a transmission appointment for car #2 at the shop). Then mom drove us to the DMV. An hour+ later, we had determined that something 'unexplainable' had happened and that while we were still responsible for the tickets at least we had new plates for the car. The woman at the DMV was very nice, and recognized that we were somehow the victims here, but there was simply nothing she could do. (Try proving you didn't make a transaction. Good luck with that.)

When we got home we put the new plates on car #1 and drove it down to the autoparts store to get transmission fluid to fill car #2 with in an effort to drive (as opposed to tow) car #2 to the shop. SUCCESS!

Thursday we dealt with the fixing of one car and the replacement of the front plate bracket on the other (plus the delayed oil change.)

By the end of Wednesday, things were looking up with the car situation, and a friend of ours was in town visiting. It was a pleasant evening. More wings. Good times.

But Murphy was not done.

Thursday night, our DVD player died. In the middle of a very special movie night. With 12 people watching it. Argh.

All day Friday we were waiting, but with the end of the week (Fri-Fri) came the end of Murphy's visit. We were drained, and tired, and were muchly glad to be done with Murphy.

Since then, things have been uneventful - knock on wood - and perhaps even (dare I say it) normal.

1 comment:

Brody said...

Cars are terrible, terrible devices. I keep dreaming that one day I'll set up my life so that I don't need one to get around. They cost a ton, break down if they get a hold, and then cost a ton to upkeep. Boo. I don't miss not driving down here one bit.

Glad you are getting it all sorted out. Good luck must be on the way with all the bad that has just come, Brody