So, Monday after work (which went late because of a meeting where I once again end up salvaging a failing acquisition), I quickly ran home to grab my lovely spouse’s car to take to the shop to get new tires put on; one of them had been regularly losing pressure, and at her last oil change we had the garage take a look, only to find that the belts were separating – not the kind of thing you can readily patch. As she and the girls are heading up to Lake Erie this weekend for the big feis (That’s “Irish dance competition” for those of you who don’t do basic gaelic) and the van’s up for inspection at the end of the month anyway, I started shopping deals to get the tires replaced, because, frankly, even apart from the bad belts, it was time.

So, the tire guys quote me a good deal, so I book a slot, and find, as they take the wheels off, that the brakes are pretty much shot all around – we’re talking pads with less than the thickness of a dime left on ’em, and none of that noisy sensor squeak that my old Chevy truck had. I can’t exactly send the girls on an eight or nine hour road trip with crap brakes, so I get them done too. This means that I’m spending my entire evening at the shop, and dropping damn near a grand on repairs on all four corners. I guess I should be happy, or at least nod in admiration, that the original brake pads on the van lasted almost 99,000 miles, and that we caught it before the rotors got torn up, which would only cost me more.

Oh well, better to spend the money now than find 3/5 of the family stuck someplace (or worse) between here and the northwest corner of Pennsylvania.

Oh, and additionally, my wife’s early anniversary present: a new laptop that she can play some games on and store her patterns for the burgeoning sewing business and such, won’t connect to my FIOS router (though will connect to the FIOS service at our favorite brewery!), though as we dig into it, we discover, or are at least reminded, that our broadband internet program is ancient, and we’re basically grandfathered in with a nearly decade-old plan with a router that’s no longer supported. So, I upgraded out plan, and for 10 more dollars a month, I go from 15 Mbps to 100 Mbps, and get a modern router out of the deal.

Anyway, I felt kind of awful about the fact that she couldn’t connect her machine to the internet without a Cat5 cable. 21st anniversary fail, right there.

Said router arrived today, though honestly, after spending all day as an Excel monkey at work and dropping a ton of money on car maintenance, I just didn’t have the energy to set up the new network this evening. I basically only had the energy (after a 3 mile hike at the park, since it was raining last night and I didn’t rack the bike) to eat a salad, pour a glass of cabinet-aged/forgotten-in-the-bacck-of-the-liquor-cabinet-for-seven-years Two-Buck Chuck shiraz and cuddle with the cat.

Hoping the rest of the week is a little less expensive and exhausting, but I know better than to pin my hopes on it.