holiday woes

Holiday season... time for one or two happy days with friends and family and 29 additional days of stress and seasonal lack-of-daylight depression.

I'm headed up to Napa for the holiday weekend which should be fun, but first I've had nothing but car trouble for 3 weeks. Today I found out I'm looking at about $1200-1400 in repairs on top of the trip to the shop 2 weeks ago. ug. Add to that a rental car for the drive up north and xmas gifts and you're reading about one poor sap. The most annoying part is my mechanic should have fixed this problem 2 weeks ago, but was too busy and told me to continue driving it and to ignore the blinking check engine light. My new mechanic (the old one is dead to me) told me I could have damaged my catalytic converter by doing that which is another expensive repair. The current repairs will take a week plus and the shop is closed the weeks after christmas so I'm carless for up to 3 weeks. Good thing I have such cool friends that are all offering to loan me cars or carpool with me.

oh, and I guess it's better than not owning a car in New York right now. Kevin, I hope you have good walking shoes!

Right now I'm trying to run X sessions over EVDO and VPN to my laptop. Talk about slow! I get one page rendered every 5 or 6 MINUTES! Guess I should have stayed at work and worked with some good bandwidth.

So ya, xmas is coming, but right now, I'm tired and want to bury my head in a whole in the sand.