Friday, October 17, 2003
Greetings, my online friends. I am back, mostly. It has been a he** of a couple of weeks and my faith in humanity is being tested to it's utmost but I'm hangin' on.
The visit with the folks went well. Nothing icky happened and the kids had a great time. And mom helped me get the house cleaned up and helped take care of the kids and dad did lots of yard work so it was a pretty good time for all of us. :oD
Ok, I know you're all just dying of curiosity about the car so here it goes. We had our car payments set up through automatic withdrawal through our bank. Everything was going along fine, the money was coming out, etc. Well, we have since found out that although the money was coming out of our bank it wasn't getting into the finance company's bank. Our finance company was bought in June, it turns out, although we were never informed of this. We started getting mail for Capital One Auto Finance "You are Pre-Approved" yada, yada.... More junk mail. And we started getting messages from Capital One Auto Finance on our voice mail. In view of the junk mail we thought it was telemarketers so we just deleted it. Turns out these guys were the ones who bought our auto finance company and they weren't getting our payments. But they didn't leave that kind of message on the voice mail. Well, last Monday night a tow truck comes to the house and takes our car away. He has a paper that says we haven't made the last 3 car payments and they are repossessing the car. After I got out of the fetal position because this is the only way I have to get to work, we started scrambling to borrow money to get it caught up and out of repo. By Tuesday night it was all done and we went up Wednesday morning to get it. I drove it out of the repo lot, 15 miles up to work, everything was great. I had the radio and cruise control on, it wasn't running hot, no smoke was coming out when I got there. I parked it, went into the building, said hi to Maria and chatted a little bit, sat down at my desk, opened up my email and a delivery guy comes in and says "You guys might want to move your cars cause there is a station wagon on fire in the parking lot". I panic and say "Is it blue?" He says "Yeah" so I grab my coat with my keys in it and sprint out to the parking lot. Sure enough black smoke is billowing out from under the hood. I run over thinking I'm going to pop the hood to see if I can do anything (my car is on fire, I'm not thinking really clearly at this point) but when I see that the top of the hood is turning black I change my mind. I go around to the passenger side to get some stuff out of the front seat and hear a really loud "POOF" sound. I scream and look up and there are flames coming out from under the hood. I back away and someone comes up to me and tells me they have called 911. People are telling me to get away in case it blows up and I just stand there watching the front end of my car become engulfed in flames. **#$#*)#*$)&(@*&*@&#@)(#*#)**
I go inside to call John, and Sue and have a meltdown and then when they tell me that the Fire Cheif wants to talk to me. So I go out and tell him the story while they are finishing getting my car put out. It kept trying to start itself so they had to cut the battery wires. Then the cops come and I tell them the story. Then I go call my insurance company and they get me set up for a rental car.
Well the car was in the Augusta Impound Lot for a couple of days then the State Fire Marshall had it for a couple of days. The insurance company thought it was probably the blower motor that Rowe Ford put in the week before but the cops and the Fire Marshall couldn't determine what started it. The Fire Marshall came to my house and all but accused me of torching it myself to get out from under it because of the repo. **)#*%)Y%)*#@$)(*#)%&))#@!#@!@$#***
Yes, I'm still a bit pi**ed off about that.
So the long and the short of it is, the car has been deemed totalled and we are waiting to hear back from the insurance company to see how much they are going to pay for and how much we will have to eat.
And I am going to have to get a new car so I can get to work.
So after a year and a half of working our a**es off trying to put the seven months of unemployment behind us the "right" way, we have admitted defeat and are filing Chapter 7 bankrupcy. I am
really trying not to get down about it all. It's not like we did anything stupid like buy a yacht or max out 7 credit cards for the fun of it or anything. We went from $50,000 a year to $30,000 a year after 7 months of neither of us working. There is no shame in this. I am going to have to create a mantra card for this and tape it to my monitor. LOLOL There is no shame in this, there is no shame in this.....
I'm very tired after the last couple of weeks and I'm trying to get my mindset back on the positive track. Things will actually be better after this all goes through in about 3 months. I might even be able to get cable back, how cool would that be? And we can start to get some home improvements done. Like shelves in my linen closet so my sheets and towels aren't sitting on the floor. :oD Or a new furnace...or getting the foundation fixed and reinforced. Getting that wall up in the upstairs bathroom...getting some drywall up in the downstairs bathroom... The possibilities are endless.
But the first step is to get another car. We hope to find a little beater we can drive for a few months until we can get another car loan and get a real car.
Keep that positive energy coming, folks. We could use it. ;oD
posted by Unknown
at 2:54 PM ::
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