Bucket of Bolts

The car repair bill has gone from being a drop in the bucket of our expenditures this month to a full-blown, recognizable percentage of them. On my way to pick Amy up from the Cubs game last night, I was driving on Devon when a flapping noise began eminating from under the hood. I knew immediately that it was one of the belts. As I began to smell something burning, the racket quickly got worse until it sounded as if whatever belt was flapping was literally tearing itself away from the pulleys. It eventually stopped making noise, but while there was no obvious repercussions from the hardware failure that took place, I knew it should be checked quickly.

So, I took the car back to the garage this morning. They examined the situation further and determined that the harmonic stabalizer needs to be replaced. Of course, the part itself is over seven hundred dollars. They'll give us a break on the labor since we've been faithful customers so that won't amount to more than fifty dollars. Still, I can't help being at least a little resentful that the unit picked now to fail out of all the possible times available. Plus, I'm not sure how long they will need to fix the problem. We're supposed to have the cabinets delivered tomorrow, so I need the car to be able to get home quickly to meet the deliverers. We'll figure something out, but this could be going much more smoothly if this automotive failure had not occurred.