Showing posts with label toyota. Show all posts
Showing posts with label toyota. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Would you like a glass with your whine?!

Actually...a glass of wine would be better.  But, hey...a girl is entitled to a little whine once in a while...right?  So...here it goes...


Tomorrow is my dreaded surgery that I blogged about months ago.  I know, it's minor, but it's nerve wracking nonetheless.  I can't wait til it's over, everything is ok from the tests, and I'm back to normal.  And...that everything else gets better than this past week.


We went to the beach on Saturday to escape the heat and came back to our car to find a ticket on our windshield.  What?!  Whatever could that be for?!  We were parked completely legal and our registration is current.  Maybe they put it on the wrong car.  No such luck!  It had our license plate number on it.  But, it is a mistake!  It said we were illegally parked in a red zone.  What?!  There was no red on the curb and we we were in a parking lot that people park in all the time!  The only sign was that you can't park in that lot at night from 10pm to 6am....we parked during the day from 9:30 am to 3pm.  We chatted with some locals and a couple of lifeguards and they said the cops do that sometimes, even though it's perfectly legal to park there, and to take lots of pictures to fight it...which we had already done...but we took a few more for good measure.  I could sure do without adding a ticket to fight to my to-do list!


As we drove away, our car started making a "bong bong bong" sound and a light came on that said the rear doors were open, even though they were closed tight.  We opened and closed them....bong bong bong.  Tried it again...bong bong bong.  It eventually stopped....for a while.  That would have been annoying to hear every couple of minutes on our hour drive home!  The next day, it did it every time I stepped on the brakes.  Luckily, hubby figured it out and fixed it.  Whew!  


Then...the check engine light came on in our Toyota.  Hubby hooked up the computer and everything was fine.  He did a little research and found that the Matrix tends to glitch sometimes and that resetting it should work.  He reset it, the light went off and it's still running great. It needs a smog test to renew the registration.  It failed!....because the check engine light had come on recently...not that anything is wrong...but the light HAD been on.  EVERYTHING else PASSED!  They told me at the shop that there are other readers/sensors that will have to clear and that it would be done by driving it 50-100 miles.  So, I went driving today...over 100 miles (a nice trip to the beach).  Afterwards, I stopped at the shop, they hooked it up before doing another test, and three sensors are still not clear.  Grrrr!  I have surgery tomorrow and I really wanted to get this done!  Darn car!  And, I have to mention that I think it's pretty ironic that I have to drive the car hundreds of miles to clear a sensor for something that was never wrong to get it to pass a smog test.  Doesn't that go against the whole smog thing?!  I mean...that's gallons of gas being used and emissions going into the air just to pass a test to keep the air clean.  Duh!


Ok...enough whining!


My drive to the beach to put miles on my car (so weird!) was also an attempt to relax, breathe deeply, and let this and other stuff go so I can go into surgery tomorrow unstressed (well...as much as I possibly can).  The ocean looked especially pretty today.  the water was clear and the blue, turquoise, and dark blue colors seemed extra brilliant.  I even saw sprays of water and mist being blow up from the surface by whales.  It was pretty exciting!  They were a bit far off shore but I saw the spray many times and I think I even saw one pop up and splash down.  Wow!  That was pretty cool!  The temp was wonderful too...74 and mostly sunny.  Ahhhh!  It would have been nice to have stayed down there and just ditched the smog test AND the surgery!  Hee hee


I'm sure I'll still be working on this whole relaxing and trying not to stress thing for the rest of today, tonight, and all the way to the hospital in the morning.  It's an outpatient surgery and not supposed to be a big deal but I always get nervous.  The whole anesthesia thing is  what gets me the most.  I shudder with how creepy/scary it is!  I can't wait for this time tomorrow.  I hope I'll be feeling good...or, at least, not too bad!  And, soon, instead of whine, I'll have some wine to celebrate!   ...Ahhh...the thought of a warm summer evening at our favorite local winery, a delicious bottle of wine, some live blues music....that sounds realllly great right now!


Prayers and positive thoughts would be greatly appreciated for tomorrow morning.  Thanks!  :-)  I'll post an update as soon as I'm feeling up to it...hopefully, tomorrow!