Does everything always have to break? I had annoying car troubles on Friday night. I was pulling my standard freakish 180 degree U-Turn to park on St. Paul street in front of the condo when I heard a loud pop and suddenly could barely turn the steering wheel. I managed to get it into the space and was grateful that I had car trouble near home so that I could go inside and ignore the problem for a while. Later in the evening I tested the car and got it to drive all the way to the parking lot but with great effort to turn the steering system. It didn't take the folks at car talk for me to know that the most likely culprit was the power steering system somewhere. I figured a belt, gear, pump, or something like that had slipped or broke.

On Saturday morning I decided that I needed to fix this problem so I called the local mechanic at the Gulf Station and he said he couldn't look at it until Tuesday. So I decided to enjoy the weekend. Sarah took her car to Valvoline and they took 40 minutes changing her oil, checking an engine light that was on because the gas cap wasn't screwed on tight enough, and finding an oil leak that had been going on for years. I drank a big Coolatta from the neighboring Dunkin Donuts along with a bagel. Because the Valvoline folks were helpful and useful I decided that I would take my car to them to fix my belt, pump, fluid, whatever problem. They identified that there was a belt that fell off it's pulley in the power steering and changed my oil. Unfortunately they couldn't fix the belt and told me to go to a mechanic. I had another Coolatta during this experience as well so I was pretty high on caffeine at this point.

I then drove to the Mobil station and they seemed very busy but interested enough to take a look under the hood. They poked around and then told me that the pump for the power steering had broken, which had caused the belt to slip off. It was a $500 job minimum and they couldn't even see how anyone could get access to remove the pump so they instructed me to call the dealer instead and had me drag my power steering-less car in a painful three point turn back to the top of the long driveway to the garage.

The people who I rented my parking space from called to hassle me because I hadn't mailed them the check on time and continued to give me a lecture about how it isn't worth their time to track down parking space renter checks. I profusely apologized and promised that I would impress them with the promptness of payments in the future. I may need to do another parking search soon enough. I actually turned down a parking space offer today while I had fifteen minutes to prepare for a presentation to an analyst and was on the line via Skype to a partner in the Netherlands. I did manage to patch together a miraculous pair of people offering spaces, one who had one from the first through the fifteenth and the other who had the fifteenth onwards to replace the evil space we were renting. The space was evil both because the woman who owned the space got into an argument with Sarah when Sarah complained that the 24hour spot was blocked by deck construction 10 out of every 24 hours during normal parking hours. We then got late notice that we were going to be towed on June 1st if the car wasn't gone so we hunted the new spaces using a cheesy sign I made in Illustrator and an agressive hunt on Craigs list.

On top of all this trouble my mom was mad at me for not having responded to the pictures that she had sent me and the folks at the video store only had the VHS copy of Attack of the Clones which was crappy. Sarah and I went to Home Depot and bought lots of home fix-up stuff like new lamps, dimmers, and a screwdriver bit. It was a really long Saturday. So today I am off to the dealership to get answer#3 on the broken power steering. My guess is that it will be about $900 to fix the damn thing and they will determine that my flux capacitor is also broken and that will cost even more.