Hostage Situation in Progress... - Chaos at its Finest

On Sunday my car started acting funny. We were 14 minutes from home when a red light came on saying the transmission was overheating. So we pulled over and Eric checked it out.

Sure enough the car was leaking transmission fluid like a sieve. Now Eric knows quite a bit about cars. In fact, back in the fall he had to take the transmission out to fix the flywheel (you don’t have to know what that is, but it’s important for the car to go vroom vroom). So he tells me were just going to have to pray really hard that we can get it home and in the garage while it drives the whole way in first gear.

Prayer was key here, because I certainly didn’t think this was going to happen. It didn’t work last fall when the transmission busted, and boy let me tell you, that led to the world’s biggest headache I have ever personally experienced. But what should have taken 10 minutes to drive ended up taking us almost 30 minutes. We were, thankfully, able to get it all the way home and in the garage.

Now comes the verdict. Husband climbs under that giant hunk of metal to check out what we are dealing with. And sure enough, comes back out to tell me it’s not a quick fix. He’s going to have to take the whole front end of the car out again to get the transmission out and then take the transmission apart to see which of those gaskets doesn’t want to hold up its end of the bargain here, so we can replace it.

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I looked to him with fear in my eyes… “How long do you think this will take? Can I drive to get the boys from school tomorrow?” I asked him, ever so hopeful.

Now my husband is a great man. He understands his wife better than I know myself. He knows that without my car I’m stuck in my house with my children with no chance of a furlough. And he know that’s not good for anybody involved. But, sadly, sometimes things are out of his control. So he has to tell me the terrible truth. I’m going to be car-less for at least the week.

A WEEK!

But not just any week. Nope it’s the week where my boys have Thursday and Friday off school. It the start of spring break for them. I was already promising trips to gymnastics, and the zoo, and all different parks. And now were all basically grounded.

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I woke up this morning, day 1 of this hostage situation, and saw that even God was sad for our situation and wept with us, as it pours buckets of rain on us. It feels almost like the Almighty is saying, “see it’s no fun outside anyways, staying inside won’t be so bad”. But I know the rain can’t last the week. I know tomorrow the sun will come out and dry it all up and we will still be stuck here.

I’m trying to see this as a positive though. I like positives. So I’ve sat here all afternoon and made myself a little weekly schedule during my captivity.

It’s not quite spring but that doesn’t mean I can’t get a jump start on the cleaning. I plan on cleaning out all the things that don’t get cleaned very often. Like the fridge, the catch-all cabinet, and under the sinks. I hope to organize my kitchen cabinets and maybe make them more user friendly. Hopefully I can organize my “craft room”, which is really, currently, just my fancy name for this large closet that we keep throwing stuff we don’t know what else to do with or where else to put it.