Maintenance Costs

I finally paid to have the front wheel bearings on Lofty replaced. Cost $300, but it would have been $450 if I didn't buy the parts myself and shop around. Long story short, that may not have even been the problem. It really bothers me that mechanics will just make repairs even if it doesn't need to be done. (Troubleshooting, dear mechanics. Give it a shot sometime.) So our car still sounds weird when making hard turns. Also, now the engine sounds like it's having trouble rolling over when idle. Grrr.

Our computer/Tv is also having a hissy. The brand new 500 gb hard drive that I bought in January is no longer recognized in the BIOS. Good thing it has a 5 year warranty. That drive had both my Win7 instance and my regular WinXP instance. And it's all gone. We lost a few months of pictures, but they weren't very good ones anyway. I have a backup hard drive, but I can't get it to boot. That's another long and detailed story. I guess we won't be watching Idol this week.

And my second crokinole board that I blogged about? It was literally hours away from completion...then I botched it. Too big of a hurry. I'm pretty sure I'll be able to fix it up (and make the error into a feature), but it's more time and money than I wanted to spend.

I'd like to thank anything and everything else I own that's not currently broken. Hang in there guys.