For those of you who have ready my posts from the past week or so, you know that I have been a little unmotivated and down in the dumps. I am glad to come in here and see that I am not the only person with "life" interfering with my weight loss efforts.
I have made it past my "oh pitty me" binge and since it is spring break, I figured I would surely get in all of my workouts and thensome (as I have no projects that I must work on for school, woohoo ).
However, that is not what is going on.
Friday, we had arranged for a friend of ours, who is a mechanic as a hobby, to do a major engine repair for us - head gaskets needed to be replaced. He assured me that if we bought the parts, my car would be good as new; and he did it for free. Mind you, this is our ONLY vehicle and if anything happens to it, we're screwed. Soooo.... he and my husband work on the car for 8 hours friday night after work, for another 8 hours saturday, and told me that the car was good to go.
Well, its not. It doesn't want to start; when does finally start it doesn't want to stay running; I have no heat or defrost; and my cruise control doesn't work. But I no longer have a massive oil leak...
Our friend is now disinterested in fixing the remaining problems, and I have to take the car to a shop to get it all fixed. We cannot afford this, as we paid almost $300 in car parts already (and that came from tax refund). So I found a shop in my small town that is willing to make payment arrangements with us, but they cannot get my car in the shop till Monday - which means I would have to miss class, unless I could get a car. I called my mom to find out if I could borrow a car while this is getting taken care of (it wouldn't be hardship for my parents, they have 5 vehicles between the 2 of them). My mom needed to hear the whole story and then needed to tell my dad.
Well, that opened up a whole new can of worms.... My dad is kind of a control freak and I am an only child - even though I'm 24 and married, if I piss him off I pay for it emotionally. Well, after being emotionally beat up on, I have been instructed to take my car to Hays (30 miles away) on friday to be fixed and dad will pay for it.
I feel trapped because if I don't do what he says, I cannot get the help I need in the future - such as borrowing a car, or getting help moving, or whatever (I don't mean anything monetary).
So after all this went down, I DIDN'T EAT... I called my best friend (who lives in tx) and we talked for like 2 hours. So, although I am stressed, I dealt with it better than I have in a long time.
Now, for those of you who don't know, Kansas just had a blizzard dump about 12" of snow in one day.... I can't hardly leave my driveway, let alone go outside and exercise. My plan for getting back on track with exercise has been thwarted once again. UGH
My husband and I had a fight because apparently, I am not supposed to be mad at our friend for the mess he left us... Screw that, if I knew they were in a position to afford to pay for the extra repairs, I would make them pay.... He promised me something and I believed him on good faith. But let me say, this guy is not the type to screw people over, so I don't know what is going on with him.

So anyway, it kinda helped my stress to see that things go wrong for everyone once in a while.
Hugs to everyone having a bad week!

Well let me tell you something that might make you feel better about your friend. My head gasket blew up on one of my cars. It cost me about 800 dollars to have it fixed. Then within 3 months (or probably less) it blew again. The mechanic wouldn't stand behind his work and I had to pay for it to be fixed again. 1400 dollars or more by the time I fixed it twice. Then it blew again. I had to wind up selling the car because I couldn't afford to fix it a third time.

My son's car blew a head gasket and so we decided to fix it ourselves. It was a LOT of work and we never did get it all the way down to the gasket area. We wound up abandoning the project and he took it to a shop and let them do the rest of the job.

You got off cheap. Sorry your friend isn't interested in fixing the other problems, but you should be grateful that he did such a big ugly job for so cheap.

Sorry you're having some rough days. We all have them. $ problems do seem to cause those! Good for you for not turning to food though. We live and learn. Hopefully things will get better, the snow will melt, you can exercise, your car will run again and you can resolve the issues with your Dad.

I think you handled the problem extremely well as far as your eating goes! Hang in there! We all get thwarted from time to time.

I'd let your dad pay for the repairs if he wants to. Your parents are always going to be your parents and maybe he just wants to help out his married daughter because he doesn't get much chance to anymore. My parents were always kind of like that when I was younger. I would refuse to ask for help, but if they could find something I needed help with, they were very quick to offer. In a way, I always found it kind of comforting, especially since parents are not always going to be there for you (I lost my dad seven years ago).

I hope it was okay to say that. I guess I just like to offer a different perspective that may or may not help you at all. But big kudos to you for not going on a binge during the hard times! That is very hard to do!

I'm not saying this is the case with you but I'm saying it has happened to me and maybe this is how your friend is feeling. I know a lot about computers so I have friends who never talk to me for months at a time call up wanting computer help. I have fixed computers and then when anything goes wrong with them after that point it must be my fault and I get a call to come and fix what I screwed up even though I know I did not cause this to happen.

Now I'm not saying that he did not do something wrong but I'm just saying that this might be why he is reluctant to come back and work on it more. I know it sucks for you either way and I hope you can get your car working again.

As for you dad paying for the repairs I'm sure he just wants to help you. And it's a heck of lot better to be paying your dad back then to be paying a garage that might not be so forgiving if you miss a payment.

Hope you can work through all this and get your life back on a more normal schedule. You got all that snow go out and take some of your frustration out on the snow. Shoveling is a great exercise too.

I thought I'd let everyone know, that my car got fixed... A few vacuum hoses were hooked up wrong and the heater core needed to be flushed. So it was inexpensive to fix, and otherwise, my car runs like new.
Thank you all so much for your supportive responses and helping me see things from a different perspective.
To Howie: I understand what you are saying about our friend wanting to fix the problems, I just want to say that this is a person we are very close with and we have a very mutual relationship - repairs need done (cars, house, whatever) and we help each other. I guess you could say that it is an ongoing debt that will never be repaid because we all enjoy each-others company and are more than willing to help out when needed. This is why I couldn't understand why he was uninterested in figuring out the problem....