On Automobiles and more grousing about spending money like we're rich

A couple of months ago, I mentioned that the drive train might be going out in one of our vehicles. Fortunately, that was not the case. It was just that the rotors were rusted so it kind of felt like driving with the brakes partially engaged.

We got that fixed to the tune of something like $1500, felt lucky about that, then three days after we got the car home, the "check engine" light came on. It went back out, we thought we were getting a reprieve, but then it came back on.

That tine, it was the emissions system. Everything physically was working okay, but we had to replace a sensor and get a firmware update, which was another $700ish.

NOW... when Mal and I were coming home yesterday, my car overheated. I pulled into QuikTrip to buy some coolant, then I called James to come follow me to the garage. I drove slowly, with the windows down and the heater way up, idling at stop lights, and made it to the garage without the car heating up again.

Apparently, I managed to keep it from damaging the radiator but a few things needed repair: the thermostat, the radiator cap neck (which melted a bit from the heat and prevents the cap from staying securely on), a cool flush, and an oil change... for just under $1000.

But, oops, when they were taking some bolts off, the bolts broke and fell into the housing, which has to be replaced. They're not charging us extra labor for that, but the housing is another $400.

Like, I'm buying stuff that's $.50 off the usual price trying to make our money last longer (which I do when James is working, but we also have money coming in, unlike now) but we just keep having to spend thousands of dollars... on repairs, on our auto insurance renewal (and, of course, the price went up because of a $700 claim), our city's water company started charging more (they should!).

James said he's averaged applying for about 10 jobs per week since he got laid off. That's well over 500 applications. I've applied for jobs and have been told I'll be invited in for an interview at one, but that was weeks ago so I'm not holding my breath. 

I will say that I'm having some luck at cobbling together side gigs like mystery shopping, marketing research, and now I'm getting into pet-sitting (kind of). 

What's kind of funny, though, is that I'm trying to get Mal to take some classes next semester to learn how to skate or swim or other stuff. And that would cost money. But I guess we're lucky because Mal says he teaches himself his own skills, so he declines. 

Speaking of Mal... He had 2 teeth pulled the last time he went under anesthesia for dental work in April 2023 and we were told at the time that it might be years until he lost more teeth. It was! However, in the past 10 days, he's lost 3 molars! And another one is loose. 

He still hasn't lost his canines, which feels wrong. But his mouth is a wonderland of weirdness, anyway.

They wanted to do braces pretty quickly, and he'll probably still need them eventually;
but his teeth have moved on their own A LOT in the past 2 years!

UPDATE: After I posted this, Mal lost his second molar of the day!!

UPDATE 2: It ended up being just over $1800. Le sigh. 

Am I Even a Woman Anymore?

 Well, friend-os, it's apparently finally happened: I am hormonally infertile. 

Despite the fact that my test results say I'm "postmenopausal," as far as I know, "menopause" is defined as being a year after the start date of your last period. My last period actually started in December, but I've been dealing with 100-200-day gaps in my cycle since 2022. I'm only slightly older than the average onset of menopause, but it has felt like a long time coming.

By the way, the title of this blog post is a joke. I don't feel less like anything now that I'm not able to get pregnant (allegedly). I'm excited about a new phase of my life! And I'm determined to live long enough that I'll have had well over half of my life without having a period. 

Although my body has been playing games with me for more than three years now, I am extremely fortunate in that I haven't really had terrible symptoms (so far). Even when I haven't had a period, I've still been aware of cyclical hormonal fluctuations, to the point that for the first time in my life, I'm able to tell myself and the people around me, "I can tell I'm going to be more easily irritated than usual for the next couple of days. Just making you aware." Of course, I do try not to be a menace during that time, as well.

I thought I was getting a kind of "morning sickness" for a few months earlier this year, but think I figured out and fixed that and it was digestive.

I haven't had any "hot flashes/flushes," although I do find myself getting uncomfortably warm after I've had a burst of activity and finally sit down. I've been taking care of that with a little hand-held fan that I sit on the table and blow into my fact for about 10 minutes, then I'm fine.

Here's something you might not know about me: I didn't really want to have kids at all. 

However, I was married to two different men who very much wanted to have children. 

I'm grateful that they did, and thankful for how my life turned out, even if it's nothing like what I thought it would be. Honestly, I'm not sure I ever did think about what my life would look like... a lot of times, it feels like life is living me, but that's just fine because so far, so good. 

Here's to the next chapter...

One of those days...

It is 12:12 AM and I'm sitting in the living room. I went to bed at about 7 last night because I suddenly felt extremely tired and bad.

By the time I got into bed and was ready to rest, I was FREEZING. We have a sheet, a blanket we use when it's a little chilly, and a quilt we usually turn down but will use it when it's truly cold out. I was wrapped up in all three, had on my sleep cap, and I was still shivering. 

I slept four hours, restlessly. Every time I woke up, it was like I was fighting a battle that was a mixture between Ready Player One's egg hunt on the OASIS, paper.io 2, speaking Spanish, whatever is going on in Andor right now, and fighting whatever I was trying to fight off. 

James came to bed around midnight, and I had stopped being chilly. I got up to use the restroom and could tell that my body was on fire. James took my temperature and it was only 101.4, so that's good. 

I decided to get up for a while and sit on the couch until I'm sleepy again (I'm very tired, but not in the sleep zone).

This is one of those times that if I had insurance, I'd probably head off to the quick care clinic tomorrow. Instead, I have an appointment coming up later this week with my primary care physician for my annual physical and I'll just talk to her about it.

The biggest problem here is that I've never been a hypochondriac, but now that I've had cancer growing in my body once (and I got so so lucky with that; truly, I hesitate to tell anyone in the real world that I "had" cancer; it doesn't feel respectful enough of people who have the kinds of cancer that require protracted and devastating treatment), when I feel suddenly very bad, my brain does go there.

When we had insurance, I definitely realized how fortunate we were. I knew then and I'm really feeling it now that peace of mind is only for the moneyed and the rest of us have to hope for the best and try not to go bankrupt. 

Having worked din property management, I understand that medical debt doesn't haunt people like consumer debt, but it's still not great to know that you have thousands of dollars outstanding, and so you have to made decisions about whether you can stay in your apartment for two more months, or whether you want the collection agency to stop bothering you.

For now, I'm going to enjoy my ginger ale, do some word puzzles, and then try to go back to sleep. Wish me luck!

Do I know Spanish?

In August, I'll have been using Duolingo for 3 years.

James will hit 4 years at the end of this month. He started studying Spanish in June 2021. I decided to go with French at first, just because that's what I studied in high school and college and I figured having some momentum from the get-go would keep me motivated.

We planned a trip to Montreal, which we took in spring 2023, and after we got home from that, I switched over to Spanish, too.

Living in Texas (and, really, anywhere in the US), this is a much more practical language. I wish I'd studied it in high school rather than French, but I think French seemed so much more romantic.

In terms of practicality, ASL would have been the most useful to me, but I shudder to think how it would have been taught, especially given how I was taught French in high school. I had to take remedial French for a semester in college, because I was functionally starting fresh. Sigh.

Now that I've been studying Spanish in Duolingo for a couple of years, I've attained a score that indicates I should be able to have basic conversations in Spanish.. but I don't feel like that's the case at all.

We're planning to visit Mexico next year, and I've started listening to an immersion Spanish podcast to see if I can gain some confidence in this regard.

What I think is happening is this: I am really good at taking tests. I can usually do pretty well in challenges and stuff, but that doesn't always translate to learning with me. I have surpassed James's "XP" within the game, and I'm further along than he is. But I'm 100% sure that he's better at actually speaking Spanish than I am.

This is a part of my personality that I wish I could turn off. I'm trying to stay focused and learn to learn, but sometimes the "gamification" here is counterproductive to why I'm actually on the app: to learn a language.

AI isn't good at human stuff like storytelling, art, or... admitting it doesn't know

I avoid using AI, but for some reason there's now always an AI summary at the top of Google search results. If you want not to have that, you can add a curse word in your search, and AI will not deign to respond.

Although it wastes so much energy and water to process AI stuff, I did try something this morning that made me roll my eyes.

Someone posted a video of search queries that were nonsense, and how AI attempted to answer them. So I typed something and got this response:

Dude... just say, "I have literally no idea. I've never heard of this and I have access to all of the information in the world.

I'm not anti-AI. I think it's great in applications that help people have more access to things, like helping blind people figure out which can is peach slices and which can is cannellini beans; taking a first run at captions for Deaf and hard-of-hearing; looking at medical imaging in conjunction with an experienced radiologist, etc. 

What it can't do is tell an original story, or make a true comment about the human condition. It steals from creators and produces a less good version of anything that a person could do.

Mal had a good time for a while giving prompts to an AI-generator for images... I hated that because I knew how wasteful it was. But he was able to work through the fun of that and stop after the novelty wore off. He learned how bad AI is at understand what people are actually saying, and how poorly it repackages the stuff it steals from.

I guess you could say that my feelings about AI are like screaming into an onion.

Cool Miners

Mal and two of his homeschool friends have an online "club" called Cool Miners.

Cool Miners cerca 2023

Caleb moved to the Pacific Northwest last year, and Kona lives close enough that we can almost see her house from our house except for one hill and a bunch of trees.

Today, I had an errand to run and Mal was going to go with me, but he ended up being on a call with his fellow Cool Miners, so he elected to stay home.

He just got off of the call, which lasted about three hours. 

It reminded me of when I was about Mal's age and my dad was the president (or some "cabinet" position)  of the local Chamber of Commerce. This was before we could afford call waiting, so my sister and I had a 15 minute limit on phone calls, in case urgent business from the CoC needed to come through. 

I'm glad Mal has made a few groups of close friends here in the homeschool community. We moved when D was about his age, and that middle school time is a difficult one to break into a whole new social scene.

I mentioned our "field trip" yesterday where Mal got to hang out with his one-day-a-week school friends, including a friend he made who no longer goes to the school on Wednesdays, so Mal rarely gets to see them anymore. 

And Mal has his post-church friend who's been meeting him almost every Sunday for the past maybe 3 years. 

It's fun to see my younger kid coming into his own, and figure out who he is outside of us. 

Quick Photography Lesson

Mal and I went to Zilker Botanical Gardens today to tour their annual Woodland Faerie Gardens.

While we were there, I took a picture of him among some of the blooming flowers. It was cute, but I didn't think it did justice to what my eyes were seeing. This is that picture.

It's fine. He's a cutie! But also, it didn't reflect how we were absolutely swallowed by greenery everywhere were walked.

Then I remembered a photo trick I read about last year and used quite a bit on our California trip: Move back and zoom in.

I stepped back about 7 paces and zoomed in. Mal didn't move. Nothing else changed. Just moving back and zooming in, which brings the background closer in the frame.

Here's the second picture.

Oh yes, indeedy, you'd better believe it.