Praises to the Extended Warranty

When I was on my way home from SNP on Saturday I noticed my car making a strange grinding noise when I applied the brakes. It kinda reminded me of the noise the car made when the I had a flat tire (which incidently had happened in the exact same place!), but stopped when I wasn't pressing on the brakes. I kinda ignored it b/c when I turned the radio up I couldn't hear it and I didn't have time to deal with it.

Well the problem quickly escalated. Last night I went out to dinner with a friend and I drove and had the radio off - man it was a loud, awful, grinding, screching sound. Sounded like something was caught in the brakes and dying or something. The car still stopped and all but it would shake a little and make SOOOO much noise.

The bigger problem was that I didn't have to deal with this - I'd had a thing after school on Mon, then Tues was our family literacy program, Partners in Print, that I'm in charge of and that took all my planning time so I didn't have a spare moment Mon or Tues to even call to get an appointment. I almost called in sick this morning to stay home and deal with this, but my classroom was a disaster because we just tossed all our materials from Partners in Print in my room - I didn't even know where my attendance was, couldn't have a sub in that. So then I thought I'd leave early - um no, I had a parent coming at 4:00 for a conference that I'd already rescheduled once.

So this AM I call the Saturn place to see what the latest time I can come is. Well, if I want it looked at today I had to be there by 4:00 - not going to happen. If I wanted to drop it off and get a rental I had to have it there by 5:30. Probably not going to happen.

So now I'm thinking I'd just wait till tomorrow. Well, tomorrow is just as crazy - it's our Thanksgiving Lunch which is just pure chaos, can't leave the kids with a sub for that so I thought I'd take the afternoon off - I tried to call it in to the sub computer and my cell phone battery was dead and I couldn't get my pin number out. aghhhhh. Maybe I would just come in late - call in and say I was having car trouble and come an hour or so late.

Oh and as a complicating factor, I HAVE to go get my allergy shots tomorrow - I already missed a week and can't go any other day. AGHHHH. So getting a friend to drive me to school was out - and depending on when it's ready (if it's ready tomorrow) I'll have to double back or leave early or something...

After school the parents I was meeting with showed up on time and we talked for about 20 mins then I hightailed it out of there. Left school at 4:30 and rolled into the Saturn dealer at 5:30 on the nose! WOW! The service guy checked me in and called the Enterprise people to "pick me up".

The best part....I have an extended warranty on my car so the car rental is "On Saturn"!!!!! YEAH! I hope the repair falls under the warranty also - I can't remember what it covers, if something broke it's covered, if it was damaged I don't think it's covered.

So by 6:30 I was crusin' in a Merlot Ford Tarus boat - I think the 80's left this car behind - it has a tape deck! I think they stopped making tape decks in cars in the 90s! The "cigarrette lighter" doesn't power my iPod (b/c this thing was built before iPods were invented I bet)so tonight I dug through my shoebox of cassette tapes - like a trip down retro lane! I'd thought about pulling all my tapes out to see if there were songs that I wanted to download from iTunes so now's my chance!