This weekend was at least 4 or 5 days long. One might think that was a good thing, except there was a marked dearth of fruity drinks in coconut shells served by muscular young men who don't speak English, and a marked overabundance of back pain and car problems.

Saturday morning, Willem and Emily were still away at their sleepover, so Jacob and I ran some errands. We fed Sue's cats, Sue having travelled again and us not having any travel plans for the foreseeable future, and then headed over to get the car inspected. Each of these required me to drive, so I didn't take much in the way of meds before I left the house... and by the time we got to the "car doctor" I was somewhat less than ecstatic. So, one might imagine, I was even less than less than ecstatic when the mechanic called me into the garage to point out, one by one, all of the big and expensive reasons why my car was not going to pass inspection.

All of my hard-earned denial about the status of my car just flew right out the window. I knew it needed work, but had been planning on just coasting it through the rest of the summer and was going to start minivan shopping in a month or so (because I am, clearly, far too cool and need a vehicle to counteract whatever coolness I might have thought about developing). Somehow I didn't think about the whole inspection thing in the midst of all this summer-planning nonsense, so I was unreasonably shocked when I figured out that I couldn't continue to drive it for those next few months. That driving-it-into-the-gound was not a future proposition, it had already happened. Argh.

If I'd have been born in, say, September, this wouldn't have happened. I'd have happily and cluelessly continued to drive my children around in my death trap and then traded it in for something that wouldn't have killed us all. (In NH, your registration/inspection cycle is determined by your birth month.) Somehow, though, I doubt that moving my birthday for a year would have gone over so well.

So, after some initial panic about, do we pay for this $500++ in repairs now or do we put that $500 toward a down payment toward a minivan now, we remembered that my dad lives here and has a driveable car and that would be a viable option to allow us not to rush out and buy the first thing we saw. The only complication was, Dad's car was in NY, at the main terminal where he works out of - he drives throughout the Northeast, but is in this one terminal most often so he brought his car there to be able to use for dinner and whatever on his time off. He had been talking about bring the car back home, but had decided to leave it there for the summer - HAH, another summer-plan shot down defenseless. So it turned out that he had a job that brought him relatively near here Sunday morning, so Willem got a phone call at 5:00 in the morning to let him know to stumble out to the road and climb on in my dad's truck, and they drove to New York to get the car.

Such fun!

THEN, after getting the car, they realized that its New York inspection had expired so they needed to get that dealt with before the car returned to New Hampshire! Such bliss! *You* try finding a place to do a state inspection on a Sunday afternoon in upstate New York... not so easy, is it? But they figured it out, and the car is home, and that's all wonderful.

Except, now I have to car-shop. Which means interacting with car salemen. Which... well, I like car salesmen better than debt collectors, at least.

Meanwhile, the kids and I met Jenny and her kids down in Boston for the Irish Connections Festival. It was a fun set-up and should have been delightful, except that I had moved from merely uncomfortable and pained to outright cranky with it. So we spent most of the time in the kids' tent, so they all had fun, which, I suppose, if someone has to not-have-fun, it's probably better that it was me than Emily or Jacob. I still whine plenty, but I do more of it in my head instead of out in the open air.

I'm just tired of being in pain. I'm tired of being afraid that any given movement will cause more pain. I'm tired of complaining about it. And I can only imagine how everyone around me feels, if I'm this tired of it, myself.