slow days 2

Well, no call about work for Friday either. Guess I have tomorrow off too. I’m pretty sure I’ll have work on Monday night and Wednesday night next week – I’m "the guy" for these high school take-home runs, so that’s eight hours of work, anyway, next week. The National Guard move I did this last weekend was about 17 hours, all together, so with the eight for the high school, I’m looking at another skinny check.

Got a note asking how other drivers cope with the slow times, and ya know, most of them are married and have two incomes. I’m single and my cat doesn’t work, lol, so I’d be up the creek if I didn’t already live in low-income housing.

Since I wasn’t working today anyway, I took the car in for service. I’ve pretty much always used synthetic oil in it, and the change interval is a lot longer for synthetic than it is for the usual stuff. The car has an oil change indicator light – some kind of optical system that "looks" at the oil and tells me when to get it changed. That didn’t say anything, but it’s been almost four months, and winter will be here next week, it looks like, so I figured "why not?" and got the car serviced anyway. They tell me that the tires need replacing – they have 4/32s left of tread depth all around (I have had them rotated regularly, so they have worn evenly), and OMG, these 17" tires are EXPENSIVE. I have never really liked the Firestone tires the car came with, and they are more expensive than some other choices anyway, but all together, four tires, mounting and balancing and an alignment will run about $750.

Gasp.

I’ve gotten over 38,000 miles out of the tires on the car now – they were new when the car was new, and regular servicing of the car since day one means that nothing else is "wrong" with it – got the brakes checked today too – plenty of life left on the brake pads and shoes, so no worries there, but 750 dollars – I do have that, but… I don’t want to part with it.

Oh, good news.

Work just called with a charter for me tomorrow. I’m taking a high school volleyball team to play a game and if they win, they’ll have another game tomorrow night – it could be a very long day tomorrow. The 12 bus gets a rest and I have the 11 bus instead tomorrow. It has a working power point for my GPS. I heard too that Adidas needs eight buses a day for the next week or so, so it’s feast or famine time again and time to load up my plate.

Maybe it won’t be a stretch to get those tires after all.

A called before that and invited me to dinner – a free meal! Yay! He’s a good cook and good with the BBQ too, so I’m going to end this here and go eat. It’s a beautiful day out there so I should get out and enjoy it while it’s here – it is November in the Northwest, after all – these kind of days could get few and far between.

Whatever happens, onwards.

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