I’m still in Washington! Annie and I were going to do our usual Christmas Eve with her family and Christmas Day with my family. She drove Eric and Jill’s car up earlier in the week, and we hung out with her family the whole time. Christmas Eve was great, and Christmas morning we got up and had fun and packed the car. Annie wanted to move the car so we could pack more easily, when she noticed that there was no resistance on the brake pedal.
So her dad checked it out, and discovered that the rear brakes were completely shot, and all the brake fluid had drained into the wheel wells. So, Annie jumped on a train this morning to go home so she could make her scheduled work shifts, while I hang out up here, until the car is fixed (truthfully, I could catch a train, but I can work from up here, and I already missed Christmas with my family, so I’m not in a huge rush to get home).
This in addition to the debacle with the windshield wipers have added up to a pretty unpleasant car experience this holiday.
Still, as many people have pointed out, we’re both safe and warm, and we didn’t get stranded on the freeway, or worse yet, get involved in a wreck due to our brakes.
I'm a 30-year-old 
car trouble
What debacle with the windshield wipers?
December 26th, 2003 at 2:01 pm
Windshield Wipers
Oh right, I never posted about that…
Well, Eric and Jill said we could borrow their car over Christmas, but they warned us that the windshield wipers didn’t work. So we decided to take it into the shop and see if we could get them fixed. We figured if it cost less than $200, we would do it, since Eric and Jill have been talking about giving this car to us, and they were loaning it to us, and it would just be a nice thing to do, since they’re pretty broke.
We took it to the garage near our house, and they said it would probably cost $175 including labor, after an initial review, and they could have it done by the next afternoon. So we left the car there.
We got a call back a few hours later saying that the wipers were working, and it was just a blown fuse, which they had fixed, and wouldn’t charge us for.
We picked the car up the next morning, and Annie discovered that while the wipers were indeed working again, she couldn’t turn them off.
We got the mechanic to confirm that he couldn’t turn them off either, and then left the car there again overnight, this time agreeing to pay $50 to have them look to find the problem.
Again, we got a call a few hours later from the garage saying they were able to turn the wipers off, and we could pick the car up.
Annie went to pick the car up, and found out that they had NOT turned the wipers off, just to the lowest setting, and didn’t bother to wait the 30 seconds to see them still going. But they also told us it would cost over $300, because the broken part was in the steering column, so we just took the car back the way it was.
Then on the drive north, appearently the wipers (which are going non-stop, remember) got out of sync, so the driver’s side wiper is either bumping against the passenger one, and barely moving, or it’s stuck flapping off the side of the car.
December 26th, 2003 at 4:45 pm