Narrow escapes

Hm.  When I wrote the title, I’m pretty sure I had at least two narrow escapes in mind.  Right now I can only thing of one (the near-accident from last Friday).  Maybe it’ll come to me.

I took my car to the mechanic yesterday because the serpentine belt was making noise and I wanted to have the alignment checked.  I mentioned my curb attack to the guy while he was checking out the car, told him I hit it pretty hard, but when I looked I didn’t see any obvious damage.  After one look at the front driver’s side tire, he was like, “Oh no,  lady, you did some damage.”  There was a lump the size of a baseball on the sidewall of the tire.  Apparently, that’s like a ticking time bomb.  The tire was still holding air, but I guess that kind of swelling is just waiting to pop at the most inopportune time.  So I got two new tires yesterday (and they fixed my alignment).  We said goodbye to just under $400.  I also got an estimate for $430 dollars to replace the belt, the idler pulley, and the tensioner (the noisy culprits) AND apparently I need to replace my rear brakes for only another $300.  John looked up the belt parts – we can get those for $75.  He’ll do that work.  The brakes we might consider having them do.  That’s much more annoying to do ourselves.

Car stuff is expensive.  But we’ll live.  More importantly, so will the car.

Maybe the other narrow escape was avoiding spending over $1000 on the car in one day?  I’m not sure.