Valentine's Day, Car repair, and an Adventure

Happy week of love! Valentine's day has always been somewhat magical for me. Even though I often found it depressing during my teenage years, I still enjoyed the spirit of it. I don't really have any great romantic story for this Valentine's day...unfortunately, it was pretty much like any other day--work and school saw to that. And poor Dave! He has been so busy this week. Along with work and school, he has been trying to fit in volunteer hours at an elementary school each day for one of his sadistic teachers. Blah. But such is life.

Wow, yesterday was busy. We realized that it was oil change time again, and so we took Blanca in Saturday morning. Now, recently we have noticed that the car smells like gasoline when the heat is on (obviously a red flag) so we asked the guy at the oil change place about it. He took a peep under the hood and informed us that we had a leak in the fuel line. Yowch. Not only that, but he told us the leak was in such a place that it could cause it to ignite. Images of our car exploding at random on the road filled my head, and I knew that we had to get it taken care of pronto. The oil change guys didn't do repair work like that, so we began our journey to find a repair shop that was open on a Saturday afternoon. This is a task not so unlike trying to locate a snowman in hell...it's just not there.

I don't know why mechanics refuse to be open on a Saturday. You'd honestly think that this would be the prime day for business--everyone who had work during the week and couldn't take their car in then would have to come in on a Saturday. That's when people have time for that kind of thing. But I'd wager about 80% of repair shops are closed on Saturday, and of the ones that are, only like half are open after noon. Crazy. So we searched, all the while fearing that our beloved car would burst into flames, until we found Master Muffler and Break. The man at the counter informed us that we would have to wait a good 45 minute just to have our car looked at, and to fix the car would be $60 an hour. That seemed a little steep, so we decided we would try our luck elsewhere. We went home and took out the phone book, calling around the city to see who was open and how much they would charge. It turned out no one would be able to fix it that same day EXCEPT Master Muffler. *sigh*. So we took the car back and hoped we wouldn't be terribly ripped off.

The guy there was pretty nice. He needed to order a special part to fix the car, and he made like 10 phone calls to find one he could get that day. Thank goodness he found one at last! We had to wait for a good hour for everything to get done, but we drove away with a non-gasoline-smelling car and $175 less in my wallet (the part was kind of costly_. I kind of get the feeling that having a car is a pretty poor 'investment'... :)

By the time we were done with all that, it was getting pretty late in the day. We did our grocery shopping and went home for a bit before going to visit family up in SLC. But I suppose everything turned out okay. At least I had the satisfaction of knowing that our car wouldn't blow up on the freeway. It was a really fun night, though, and it was a good way to end a day that had sucked so freaking much.

Today, Dave and I went on one of our adventures, this time to our old high school in P.G. Neither of us have been back there since we graduated. We parked and walked around the outside of the empty building, remembering the old days. Some of our memories were shared, many were not, but it was so amazing to have all of these dormant memories come back to life. It's so strange--they are doing all of this construction on the school, like building a new wing or something. A lot of the city is changing like that. My goal is to go back and take pictures of everything I remember from living in P.G. before they are changed beyond recognition, so I will always have them.