More Bad News

As if not getting the full-time jobs I applied for, the two expensive car repairs and my as-yet unsuccessful attempts to get the State of Arizona to pay my unemployment claim aren't bad enough, I've got more bad news. Times two, in fact.

One: an insurance company wants to total John's car after he was rear-ended again a week ago. I don't know whether he'll be able to keep it, or get enough money to replace it. We can't take on a car payment right now. Even if we qualified for a loan on John's income alone, we'd be crazy to add to our monthly obligations. John wants desperately to hang onto his Alero, which despite its bent frame is drivable, but I doubt that our insurance company will allow that once they hear what the other insurance company said.

As for me, I remember how this worked when the kid in the 1965 Ford truck totaled my Saturn. The settlement was almost enough to pay for a car three years older, my 1994 Eagle Vision. And yes, that's the car I've spent $1100 on this month with two loans from my dad and one from Citibank.

Two: I heard a mosquito-like whining coming from the den just now, partly muffled by the sound of the room air conditioner in there. Thinking the a/c had overheated or frozen up or something, I turned it off. The whine continued. It was coming from our decade old ONLY television, a Magnavox that was rather good in its day and has never given us any trouble. Now it has no picture, no channel changing, and the only sound it makes is one we wouldn't want to hear.

The tv, back when it used to work.

"One by one, everything we have is breaking and we can't replace it," John said.

We have a Commodore 64 monitor in the bedroom, which is tiny and has the wrong aspect ratio. But it still works, bless it, after a quarter century. It will be interesting to see whether it's possible to run cable tv through it via our little seven-year-old VCR/DVD player or our $30 DVD player.

If the unemployment money finally comes through this week, maybe we'll get a modest tv of some sort. Otherwise, we'll have to made do with the Commodore and John's computer. My laptop doesn't have the RAM for multitasking, and I'm not at all sure the DVD drive is working reliably these days.

And this week we somehow lost Disc Two of Doctor Who: The Complete First Series. We've both been searching for several days, to no avail.

Please, God, I'd like some good news now.

Karen