Grumpy Monday

Full disclosure – I’m in a really awful mood. I was all happy on Saturday, when I finally got around to painting my porch railing. By dark, I had half of it finished, and so I went in all satisfied with my labors and ready to wrap it up on Sunday. Unfortunately, either the paint fumes or some ill-timed pollen meant that I woke up Sunday all stuffed up and feeling like I’d been hit by a truck. Then my “service engine soon” light came on. (At least “Sunday Night Football” was there to cheer me up… what a really entertaining game!)

So today I go in for an oil change and diagnostic, only to find out that something’s gone haywire with the oxygen sensor on my catalytic converter, which, like everything on a Saturn, is impossible to reach. Sigh. On the plus side, it’s not something that’s going to make my engine blow up, and I don’t really *need* to fix it until my car’s up for inspection. But, when I do, I’ll need to cough up about $300 – to fix something that doesn’t *actually* affect how my car runs. As I drove away from the Flow Service Center, I briefly cursed the tree-huggers and their stupid emissions crap… until I reminded myself that a) those silly tree huggers are part of the reason my nine-year-old car still gets 28 mpg/highway, and b) it’s not *their* fault that Saturn put the frakking 02 sensor where they did.

Yeah, collective good, whatever… by the way, it’s going to rain all week, so my half-painted porch looks even *more* trashy than it did before, if that’s even possible.