Why Sunday’s Suck (as in draining my wallet!)

Maybe it’s because I don’t go with my wife to Church on Sunday’s (even though it’s not my religion). Maybe it’s because it’s April. I don’t know. All I know is the past three Sundays have been expensive.

Sunday March 28th.

First my wife gets a flat tire. I’m not with her at the time, I’m buying her a new Bluetooth hands free @ Best Buy. We call AAA, they come out to help fix her tire. They go for the spare – woops, it’s not there! Just Great! Oh wait, all 4 tires need replacing. Luckily Pep Boys is across the street. We have the AAA guy fill the flat so it will last long enough to get to Pep Boys. We get over there and it’s 15 minutes before closing, we have all 4 kids with us and they are hungry. It will take 30-45 min to replace all 4 tires. Here is where the fun really starts.

Just as I’m walking outside to tell my wife to go ahead and get dinner, the mechanic comes out and says “Come with me, I need to show you something”. Great, what now? He takes to my wife’s Sienna and shows me that both her rear and front breaks are gone. Not 1mm, or .5mm; gone, baby, gone.

Final tally: $800+ just for the car.

Sunday April 4th

The day starts out sane. It’s Easter, we head to Church with my wife’s parents, then come home and have Easter dinner. I turned on the dishwasher before we left because I knew we’d need the room later in the day. The day goes just fine. At the end of the day, I go to turn on the dishwasher. I push the usual “Normal Wash” button. Nothing starts. I open and close the dishwasher in case it wasn’t closed properly. No Sale. Still doesn’t start. I try different modes. No go. Great…..

On Monday I call the repair guy who fixed our Washer in the garage a few months back. He comes over tinkers with the dishwasher and says: “It’s the PC Board. It seems to have a crack somewhere in it. It will sometimes start depending on if you have it in the right position. It will cost you $350 to replace it plus installation.” Great….

My wife and I decide to instead buy a new one. Why spend $350 on a broken dishwasher that also needs new baskets which is another $200 ($100/each – are you kidding me?!?!). So we go out and buy a new KitchenAid dishwasher whose baskets will not deteriorate because they are Nylon instead of plastic.

Final Tally: $900+ (add $45 to the Repair guy for coming out)

Sunday April 11th.

I intentionally stayed home to avoid going out and having something break. I figured that if I A) didn’t leave the house and B) didn’t have the in-laws over I should be safe. I thought wrong.

First, my computer has been randomly shutting down for the past week. I thought it was because my infant daughter or someone else keeps accidentally hitting the power button. Well, today It shut down on me without warning. After some research and installing Speed Fan it turns out that the computer is running 2x as hot as it should be. Both the CPU and GPU are showing extremely high levels. I crack open the case just to find that the back fan is not working and the CPU fan seems to be a generic Intel fan that just may not be powerful enough for the Dual Core. Great….

So to add insult to injury, while I’m running Speed Fan and moving some web sites to another ISP in the evening, the internet connection goes down. Here I think it’s Time Warner screwing me again with their crappy service.

Today, Monday the 12th, my wife calls me and tells me that the connection is still having problems and our phone is not working. Since our phone service is through Vonage and requires a “reliable” internet connection she was upset because she couldn’t use the house phone. Luckily, when the line is down, all incoming calls get routed to her cell phone. But now I’m wondering what’s really going on.

When I got home, ate dinner, and put the kids to bed, I finally sat down to see what was going on. I ran through tests on Speedtest.net, PingTest.net, and SpeakEasy speed test. What I found was that I was dropping packets like no tomorrow. Great…

I get into my trusty CMD.exe mode and start doing tracert and ping requests to see what’s going on. Pings come back as high as 3000+ ms and as low as 200ms. What’s interesting is that the tracert first hop, my router is showing 200ms response times. This seems oddly high. I run ping -t against my router and sure enough. It’s the culprit! What the heck?! I’ve restarted both the router and modem three times and no luck, same results. Looks like it’s time to get a new router.

Final Tally:
– Cooling system for computer – TBD
– New router with Vonage support – TBD.

Next Sunday

Not only will I stay home next Sunday, but I may just stay in bed and not touch anything! Sunday’s are costing me too much!!!!!!!