The gods refuse to fucking STOP IT . . . .

Tonight while driving up MoPac to pick up TerribleLynne and go to the poly dinner, I noticed the car making an odd, faint noise that I couldn’t quite identify—except I didn’t think it was supposed to be making a noise like that.  Then on the way back down MoPac after dinner the oil-pressure idiot light came on:  intermittently, but it shouldn’t come on at all.  I swore a lot and managed to baby the car to a gas station/convenience store, where I could see what was going on.  I opened the hood to check the oil level—

and found oil all over the passenger’s side of the engine compartment.  Oil spray from somedamnplace coated the serpentine belt, the alternator, a couple of fluid reservoirs, the insulation to an A/C compressor pipe, and I don’t know what else.  The engine was at least two quarts down, which went a long way toward explaining the noise I was hearing earlier.  Obviously I’ve either blown an oil seal somewhere, or sprung a leak in the pump, or who knows what other goddamn expensive thing the car has thought of to do to us.

It was already headed to the repair shop in pretty short order to find out where the brake fluid is slowly disappearing to—probably a leaking master cylinder, since none of the slave cylinders look like they’re leaking.  That was going to be bad enough.  Then I have to buy one more tire before the end of November, so the car has a chance of passing its annual state inspection.  And now it comes up with a new-and-undoubtedly-expensive something else to break . . . and I don’t know what we’re going to do.  In a city as big as Austin, with all the different places each of us has to be every day, we can’t operate the family without one working car.

The mortgage company is already angry with us because I shorted them $400 on last month’s payment, since we had a $600 one-time drop in monthly income during September  They’re insisting that I make up the shortage by Halloween, in addition to making the full October mortgage payment.  L is working as hard as she can on a big costuming job so she can invoice at least part of it, but that’s not going to make up the difference either.  And that doesn’t even begin to address the other annoyed creditors who are getting paid in-due-course-but-late.

And then, I found yesterday that my current temp assignment is ending three weeks earlier than I was told it would end when I began it.  It seems our team is so much more efficient than the scratch teams this employer’s had to do the job in past years (that of processing 60,000 membership renewals for a professional organization) that we’ve worked ourselves out of jobs.

Before the car broke tonight, I thought we had at least a chance of scraping by somehow until IRS picked up again in January.  Now, I wouldn’t give you a plugged nickel for our chances.

Johnny Carson retreated from the Sears Tower and converts the helmet.  Fnord.