An Expensive Week

This week has not been kind to my pocketbook. We are currently in the process of selling our home, and have already moved into an apartment closer in to the city (to get out from under the miserable commute I used to have) so our budget is already being squeezed pretty hard.


The week started off with Donna having a little fender-bender. Nobody was hurt, thank goodness, but the impact was sufficient enough to cause damage to both vehicles.

Then, the furnace in our house quit working. The thermostat is digital and it was completely blank. There was a circuit breaker tripped, but resetting that didn't help. I thought (hoped) that it was perhaps just a failure in the thermostat since it was blank, so I went to home depot to get a replacement.

I had never installed a thermostat before, but I figured it couldn't be too hard. I took a quick look at the options at the store and found one that said it was compataible with "99.9%" of all systems. When I got it home and got ready to install it, I discovered that, surprise, surprise, my system fell into the 0.1% category. Sigh... so I made a few more notes about the existing connections, went back to Home Depot, and exchanged the thermostat for one that was compatible with my system.

The second attempt was more successful. I was able to get it hooked up and before long, we could feel hot air blowing. We felt very fortunate that it wasn't going to be an expensive repair after all. Hooray!

The next day, the heat was out again.

Since I don't really know much about heating/AC systems, we decided it was time to call in the professionals. A couple of service calls later, we had a circuit breaker replaced, some kind of capacitor replaced, and some wiring repaired. All of this ended up costing about $600.

Finally, to top off the week, I got a crack in my windshield. Some object, which I didn't really see except as a blur, but which I heard very distinctly, flew up off the road and hit the windshield of our car. It put a chip in the windshield, which has now grown into a crack about 4 inches long, and it continues to grow. The thing that makes this even more infuriating is that I just had a new windshield put in a couple of months ago! I had a crack in the windshield back then, which I had been living with as a minor annoyance for months. Since I had the car in the body shop anyway, I decided it would be a good time to go ahead and get the windshield replaced. It was nice while it lasted.

I wish I knew why my windshield acted as some kind of magnet to glass-cracking road debris! :(

At any rate, I'm glad to see the past week come to an end. Maybe this week will balance things out, and a big bag of money will fall out of the sky in front of me.

I just hope it doesn't hit my windshield!