Recharging

Whew. What a weekend. And it was a three-day long one too, since I had Friday off. I could tell you all that I spent Friday morning in a flurry of useful activity, like cleaning and doing laundry and cooking marvelous, healthy food, but that would be a big fat lie, because lately I did a bad, bad thing and dragged out my copy of Civ IV again, and, well, it’s sort of been sucking all my time away. Oops.

I did do a teeny bit of cleaning, mainly some putting away and wiping of counters, but the upstairs has remained in surprisingly good shape (for a house with two computer nerds and six hairball-hacking, fuzz-shedding cats) so it didn’t take very long to tidy up, in preparation for the kitchen designer. She got a little lost getting to our house (our street is really easy to pass right by if you don’t know exactly where to look for it) but eventually she made it, and then we spent about an hour and a half talking and tossing out ideas, and climbing up into the attic to check out whether or not the roof of the enclosed back porch could be raised (good news – it can). It was a very useful discussion, not only because she had a lot of good ideas, and also brought up some issues that we hadn’t even thought of when it comes to redoing the kitchen, and I told Richard after she left that even if we weren’t going to talk to any other designers, I’d be perfectly fine working with her. But we’re being good and meeting with a second designer next weekend, just because it seems like the responsible, adult thing to do (says the responsible adult who has been staying up way too late at night playing Civ IV lately…but I digress).

Saturday morning I decided that since there was still half a bag of chocolate chips in the cupboard, I needed to make another coffee cake. So we had that for breakfast (and then we also had it for lunch – what was I saying about being responsible adults? Oh, wait.), and then we drove off to Woodland to get haircuts. We tried to take my car, but it refused to start (which, being a Prius, means that it pretends that it does not recognize the key and starts beeping insistently and results in a teensy bit of swearing on the part of one of those responsible adults I mentioned previously), so we took Richard’s car, and then swung by the Toyota dealer in Davis on the way home so I could get a new battery for the key, because I was really hoping that this was the problem. Except that it wasn’t – even with the new key battery, the car still stubbornly refused to start. So I found the closest Toyota service center to our house and called them and they said ‘bring it in’. Ugh.

Luckily, we have car insurance with roadside assistance, so they said they would send out a tow truck. In the meantime, I decided to take advantage of the recent drastic rate cuts the feds have been up to, combined with the little letters from our mortgage company saying “Act now and you could get an extra half point off!”, and I commenced with a very long phone call that resulted in us refinancing the house. Amusingly, when we built our first house, we did exactly the same thing (refinancing) at about the same time after we moved in, and we were able to drop a full interest point that time. This time around, we didn’t go down a complete point, but it was more than worth the call, because the not-so-fun part about meeting with the kitchen designer is that it really hit home just how much our current kitchen remodel budget was not going to work for everything we had in mind. When we sold the previous house we set aside all the profit into a savings account, specifically for the kitchen, but kitchen remodels are very, very expensive. So part of the refinance was to add on a little bit of extra cash to bring our budget more in line (and amusingly, our monthly mortgage payment is still going to be lower than what we’re paying now). I suspect we’re still going to be doing the kitchen in phases, and we’re probably going to have to do some of the work ourselves, but I’m crossing my fingers that this will get us a little further along the road that leads us far, far away from the ugly, dysfunctional kitchen of doom we currently have.

But back to the car. First of all, the tow truck driver called and delayed for an hour – good thing I wasn’t stranded on the side of the road somewhere, isn’t it. Ugh. Then he tried to convince us that the dealer was further away than it is, and the insurance company wouldn’t cover the entire distance (um, sorry, buddy, I Google-Mapped it, and I know the distance to the tenth of a mile) and wouldn’t we like to toss in an extra $20 in cash. Why no, we would not (and how about we call the insurance company to check on this, hmm?) Then he got all annoyed when I couldn’t put the car in neutral (car won’t start – Prius has a joystick gear shift, which the car does not recognize if the car won’t start – oh, what fun we were having!) and didn’t want to wait until I’d gotten someone on line at the dealer to tell me how to take care of it, and then he insisted that he had another job and had to leave (even though he wouldn’t have been finished with our car if we’d been able to get it loaded in the first place), and at that point we were just glad to be rid of him. Idiot.

I was frustrated because even though I have been very careful to never take my manual out of the car (for precisely this reason), the manual is missing. I do not know if it got bundled into stuff and came into the house at some point in the moving process – and if that’s the case then who knows *where* it ended up – or if it was removed by someone the last time I took it in for its scheduled maintenance, or what, but it is nowhere to be found in my car. And this became even more of an issue because after Richard called the dealership *again* (and allow me to have a tiny little rant here because no one even suggested this when *I* called – if they had, we could have avoided the whole annoying tow truck driver debacle to begin with!), they suggested we try to jump-start the Prius, so we could at least get it in to be looked at.

Of course, there is no owner’s manual to be found online, and all the info I could find about jump-starting a Prius very not-so-helpfully simply refers the reader to the manual, so I did the next best thing, which is to call the first person I could think of who would have a Prius and an owners manual – my parents. I figured between the two of them (since they each have a Prius), one of them was bound to have a manual. Sure enough, I was right. I figured they could just read me the part over the phone while they were still driving (or rather, whoever was in the passenger seat could do that), but my dad stopped the car, got out in the rain (sorry, Dad!) so he could pop the hood on his car so we were both looking at the same things and walked us through how to jump start a Prius over the phone. Uh. I should point out here that Richard and I are not complete idiots when it comes to cars and we have both had to jump start a normal car before but the Prius has a different sort of battery so it isn’t quite the same.

Anyway. Finally got the car started, and off we went to the service center, where they said ‘oh, no problem, easy to fix, you just need a new battery’ (no, not the big expensive hybrid battery – the little, regular car battery) and half an hour later, it was installed and the car started instantly as if it had never had a problem in the first place, and hooray the whole ordeal was done. Phew.

After all the excitement of Saturday, Sunday was a lovely day of nothing much at all. We managed to drag ourselves out of the house for a very late lunch, and we ran a few loads of laundry, but otherwise I lounged around and worked on my niece’s scarf, or else played Civ, and Richard lounged around and read or poked at his computer, and it was a lovely, quiet, lazy day. And that was very, very good.