Summer? Are you out there?

Apparently, I moved to Seattle and just didn't realize it. Tomorrow is the first day of summer. The high tomorrow will be 68, with rain. We've had two days this month where it didn't rain at all. Ridiculous. Yesterday turned out to be decent, about 80 and very humid, but we did have our daily rainfall in the pre-dawn hours. We haven't put the air conditioners in yet. Why bother? I suppose a perk would be the lower electric bill, at least. And I've never seen such green grass. It might be even prettier if I could mow it, but it's too wet.

At this rate, the only summer I'm going to see will be when we go to Florida next month.

Seriously?

No, I have not fallen off the face of the earth. I do, however, have my first full-blown cold of the year. In June. The month in which I should be able to wear shorts and have all the windows open. You know, warm weather. Yeah, there's none of that. Our high today was 67 degrees, and it rained. Again. Par for the course for the past few weeks. I realize New England summers are typically cooler than the rest of the country, but this is ridiculous.

We have new neighbors. Okay, not brand new, but new enough. I wish they'd move somewhere else. They're a cross between thugs and trashy. I know that's not nice, but I couldn't think of any nicer words that applied. There are at least 3 who live there, and 2-3 more who either live there or spend a lot of time there. They're all 20ish. The girls wear clothes I wouldn't let my daughters out of the house in, and the guys wear jeans down to their knees. They yell, and don't seem to mind airing their dirty laundry to the rest of the neighborhood, usually with a variety of 4-letter words. There are 2 cars that sound awful, look worse, and blare heavy base from the stereos in the afternoons. The only bright side is that they wind down around dusk, and there are no late night parties.

I guess I can hope they're renters with a short-term lease.

Money Pit

I shouldn't complain. My van is paid off, it's been paid off for well over a year, and it's only got 50K miles on it. We dropped it off for an oil change this morning. An oil change!

They called a couple of hours later. The front tie rods need to be replaced. One needs to be replaced like yesterday. Which I already knew... they did a general inspection on it last summer and told me then. Oh, and did I know the brakes were squealing? Yes, they squeal all the time, they were also inspected last summer and were okay, just loud and obnoxious. But I get free tire rotations there, so he said he could do that and just "happen" to inspect the brakes for free at the same time. Fine. He called back an hour ago... the front left brake pad and rotor both need to be replaced. Well, hell.

My $25 oil change has turned into a $800 repair bill. On the bright side, you can no longer hear me from a block away when I hit the brake. And my front wheels are no longer in danger of falling off.

Now I feel obligated to drive the damn thing into the ground instead of trading it.