Last night the check engine light came on while John was driving home from the train. I spent all last night hoping a night parked safely in our garage would make it feel better but no such luck. He took it in this morning and it was there all day. Six hundred bucks later and we have our car back. As some of you may know, due to a mess up by the salesman, we have free maintenance on the Focus. I’m not just talking oil changes - we get all the recommended service for free. We’ve been really good at following the maintenance plan - there’s something about telling the service guy that you actually don’t owe them $400 for package 4 (aka the greatest ripoff around) that makes you want to do it again and again. So needless to say we are not impressed that anything this major went wrong. Especially not seeing as we are a mere 6 months (3000km) away from the end of the lease. I know the odds are higly in Ford’s favour that we’ll be driving one of their minivans soon but now I am even more determined to try and find a way to not let that happen.

So that in itself was enough to label the day crappy. Unfortunately it doesn’t end there. At lunch time John called and said he felt sick…like he was going to barf sick. I told him to go buy himself some lunch and report back. When he called an hour later and said that he couldn’t eat his Wendy’s chicken sandwich combo I knew we were in trouble. By then he was also reporting a fever and a headache. Since we had no car he had to take the train to the dealer and get the shuttle home. He lay in bed all afternoon while the girls laughed and screamed their heads off - with no car and heavy rain there was nothing I could do to keep them quiet. He got up to have some dinner and for an hour he seemed to be feeling better. I got the girls to bed and then he started barfing. John never throws up. The last time I saw him barf it was self inflicted and even then that only happened once and it was many years ago (Coby will remember!). He is now laying on the couch, drinking gingerale (John hates gingerale), with two pairs of socks on and a blanket because he is freezing. We got some flu stuff but he’s waiting until bedtime to take it.

Not that it would do us any good now but we had an appointment tonight to get the girls their flu shots. We had to cancel it because we had no car. Cross your fingers that the girls (or even me for that matter) don’t get sick.