SO Much!

It's been a total cracker of a week around here.  The other day I was driving home from school pick-up with both children in the car, when suddenly...the battery light came on.  Oh. Shit.  I was quietly philosophical though, reasoning to myself that at least I was on my way home, I live right next to a service station, all is right with the world.  Well that line of reasoning got me as far as the street parallel to ours.  As you may know, our street is a little one way thing coming off our nation's major highway.  So I have to turn on to the highway to get home.  Of course I managed to get every pedestrian at a crossing, every red light and every slow driver on the way home, so that by the time I got ready to drive down to the highway, I was thinking I was home and hose.

That was, until I noticed the radio aerial suddenly lower on its own.

I went cold.  

I lowered my foot down on the accelerator.  No revs.  I coasted down the (small) hill to the highway, turned the corner and put my foot down to the floor.   I managed to rustle up a few dying, death rattle sounding last revs to sputter us across the three lanes of highway to reach the mouth of our street.

And there we stopped.  In the start of our street.  A one way street from the highway, remember?  So if anyone wants to drive down they now can't.  And did I mention I had both children in the car?

Seriously, I was so happy.  Happy that we had made it to the street.  Happy that we weren't stuck dead on the highway.  Happy that I was able to run down to the service station and ask the lovely guy that works there for a helping hand - he loves the children and was more than happy to help.  Happy that we live on a really friendly street - someone who lives a few houses down from us pulled up behind me and pulled his car over and helped us.  He pushed the car, he supported the car, he even drove the car in reverse back on to the highway.

And, talk about lucky, there is a battery centre two doors down from our street on the highway.   With LOVELY staff who see no problem with directing traffic, jumpstarting, inspecting and generally solving our problem for us.  Because it turns out that the alternator was completely stuffed.  The battery guy said it would either be cheap (replace the brushes) or horrifically expensive (replace the whole alternator).  Guess which one it was?  Oh yes.  $2k later thank you very much.  I think James and I both wept a little when we heard the cost, because seriously, something that costs THAT much but is THAT necessary yet gives nothing new to your lives...well that really is a sucky combination.  But here we are, 2k down on our (meagre) savings and exactly where we started off.  With a car that runs.  Woot.

So that was just one of our exciting adventures.  We've had lovely visitors (Hi Tracey and Jenna!), lovely dinner picnics (Hi Jen and family!), day trips down the coast, caterpillar transformations, photo orders (ohmygoodnessexciting), illness, solo cycling and lots of other stuff.  Truly!  See why I haven't been blogging?  I've been slack on photo taking too (I find that happens when I'm busy with work photos) but I will work on a blog post this week to update on our lives.  We've got pretty cool lives.