Well, it's Tuesday morning and I'm still trying to recover from the weekend. And no, Andy, the Packers blowing a 21-3 lead wasn't the worst part. (But it was a nice little salt in the wound)
I had planned to take the van into the shop on Saturday morning because it was leaking coolant from a place that I didn't want to try to have to reach to fix by myself. Turns out that problem was a small hole in the radiator. The bigger problem was badly corroded coolant lines that supply heat to the back of the passenger compartment. The shop told me that Mazda issued a recall on this for states that put salt on the roads in the winter (Hello Wisconsin!). We bought it used, and I'm sure Mazda sent a post card to the original owner who promptly threw it away. The kicker is that, that recall expired in 2010 and we were on the hook for $900 for some dealer-only parts to get it fixed. Has anyone ever heard of recalls expiring?
The bigger issue was when we woke up on Saturday the house was cold, and the furnace was blowing cold air. I couldn't get it running, so I called a service guy. We knew when we bought this house 10 years ago that we were on borrowed time with that furnace, and it chose this weekend to kick the bucket. $3200 for a new one.
Then, to top it all off, our mainframe system at work decided to freak out Sunday night and lose connection to half of it's disks. So I had to deal with all of that mess Sunday evening and all day yesterday.
I could really use a Dole Whip about now.
Bright Side - I was able to use that 40% at Southwest to book some sweet airfare for the DDC!