I love long weekends!

W0rking for a bank, I get Monday off in observance of my birthday. Okay, it's not for my birthday, I'm not that special. It's the observance of Veteran's Day. And because I still have lots of time off, I need to use it or lose it. So I took Friday off for a nice long four day weekend.

My plan was sleep in, get up and go for a bike ride which would eventually end up at work. I can hear you all now. Why work? Because that's where the gym I joined is at, right in the middle of work. And the gym found a new Yoga instructer, so Friday was to be the first day of the new Yoga class since the middle of September. I've missed Yoga. I love how it stretches all of my muscles and how some days I even have soreness in some surprising muscles, like the day we did a backwards arm raise and the muscles between my shoulder blades were very sore.

After waking up, I returned mom's phone call and found she needed a ride to her doctor appointment. I can't even remember all the times she has scrapped her plans or gone into work on little to no sleep because of medical situations, so without hesitation I headed to mom and dad's. One doctor appointment and 3-4 hours in the ER later, mom is sent home the official diagnosis of "I'm very very sure it's chest wall pain" which can encompass anything. On the plus side, all of the tests came back negative, so I guess we can live with a diagnosis of chest wall pain and a promise that it'll go away in a few weeks.

After putting mom into bed and waiting for dad to get her prescription's filled, I headed home as I needed to work my part time job at 7. Now, let me back up and provide some background information to my few readers before I continue. I bought my car in 2003, at the time it was technically a year old. Recently my car has decided it wants to very roughly idle while stopped and in gear. So roughly that I would physically be moved as well. J, after riding and contemplating, was thinking it's a vacuum leak and the biggest problem with that is actually locating where the leak is. Unfortunatly, that's not something he has had time to do just yet.

Last night I was heading home on the freeway a good hour plus before I had to log in for work. I didn't get very far when my Service Engine Soon light came on. Now, never having had this light come on before, I had a mild panic and called J. Which didn't do a whole lot of good since he was currently in a work truck heading to Riveria Beach with a bunch of co-workers and he was at least an hour away. But my hope was that if I could describe the clicking sound I was hearing (which I still can't and still have no idea where it was coming from) he could let me know if my car was safe to continue home or not. I pulled off the freeway and J called a friend of his who knows cars and used to work for his dad's auto shop. S came and plugged in a little computer, 5 minutes later he was telling me the problem is something called an EGR (Dad says it's part of the emissions system), could cost me around $130 and was totally safe to drive home. Not only that, but fixing the EGR will most likely take care of the rough idle. I was very relieved to know it wasn't something that would cost many many $$$'s.