More unwanted expenses

While I was away, I left my car with Cat Lady, and she noticed that it seemed to have occasional handling issues at high speeds; she'd noticed it the previous week too. It was significant enough that she thought that it might pose a safety problem. After it was pointed out to me, it did seem that its ride was a bit odd. I'd previously checked the tire pressures, and topped them up, but there was no noticeable change. So I brought it in (it needed its tires rotated anyway) and found out that the rear shocks were shot. The way shocks generally fail, though, is gradual, so I didn't notice the change the way she did. I suspect that it would also have been much more noticeable if the front shocks were bad; as it was, the oscillations that result from bad shocks were relatively mild from the perspective of someone sitting in the front (and I haven't ridden in the rear of the car in a long time). So I forked over around $350 for the repair. Oh well, the car is much nicer to drive now. Not to mention safer; all that would have to happen is to hit a pothole while rounding a curve at high speed, and I could have been sent hurtling into the path of a Mack truck. While this would likely have solved the problem of what to do with my future, it seems like an awfully drastic solution.

Incidentally, the recently purchased work van is showing itself worthy of being owned by our company. As mentioned previously, the instrument panel has been working erratically almost since we got it, and more recently we found that the air conditioning, which worked when we received the vehicle, no longer worked. It was taken in last weekend. The A/C was fixed (for the time being at least; Norfolk Dude suspects that they system has a slow leak and was simply charged up before selling the van to us); the instrument panel problem was attributed to (and I'm not making this up) a supposed tendency for the dashboards to warp in this model of van. My boss lapped this explanation up with his usual credulity (much like he raved about how this particular guy was so good at restoring insurance writeoffs, he could take two cars of the same make with damage at opposite ends and weld together the good halves of each to make a perfectly sound car). How a warped dashboard is supposed to cause all the erratic behaviour of this instrument panel was not made clear; I suppose a warp could conceivably cause some electrical component to contact metal when it shouldn't and cause a short, but in such a case I'd expect it not to work at all, rather than to behave as it does.

In a little while I'm going to track down flyingbuttress of Agile Like This; she's got a booth at a craft sale today, and I want to buy some additional copies of their CD for people. Let me say it again- they rock.