Stress – you are NOT my friend

Ahhh, stress. What a horrible friend you are. Unfortunately, this is a friend that I have made an acquaintance with over the last few weeks, and it doesn’t seem to want to go anywhere.

So, my car battery went out. That ended up being more of a hassle than it was worth, but at least it was a fairly easy fix. But now, when I was driving to Victoria to do some work for some extra cash, my check engine light came on. “Oh great, it is gonna tell me that my engine needs replacing” was my thought. Of course, like most people, my mind immediately goes to the most expensive thing it can possibly fathom, but it turned out to be the cannister purge valve. My thought then was “what the heck is a cannister purge valve.” Well, it turns out, it is really not that expensive, considering the alternatives. The problem however is determining where the thing is located. YouTube, who is usually a great asset when locating a vehicle problem that I haven’t dealt with before was useless this time. It showed a lot of different locations, but none for my particular vehicle.

So I went to a mechanic. Not to get them to fix it, because of the cost, but just to tell me where it was located. So, he showed me. And he showed me wrong. So, I called the car dealership mechanic. He told me it was near the gas tank. So I went to the parts store to get the part and, hey guess what, maybe it isn’t by the gas tank. Maybe it is somewhere else. We searched and MAYBE we found where it is located. And the fun thing is, to get to it, basically you have to remove the entire front end of the vehicle. So, I wait, and hope my car doesn’t break down. Or explode. Not that that is a reasonable expectation, but hey, anything is possible, right?

Stress, you are not helping me at all. Last week, I donated blood. My blood pressure was surprisingly good. Today it most likely wouldn’t be.

I need to find a place to live. When I first started working for the paper, I had a great place to live but unfortunately I had to leave after a family member of the person I was renting from got sick and needed to move in to where I was living. I found another place, and we talked about me staying there until “March-ish.” Well, it is March-ish and I am running out of options. 

The low income apartment around town don’t like dogs. “You can only have dogs if they are listed as service animals. It is really easy to get them listed as service animals” I was told. I would rather live in my car than have to do something that dishonest. People need service dogs, and I feel that it is extremely wrong to abuse this. Plus, I have lived in my vehicle before. Of course, at the time, I was in my twenties, I had a pick-up, and I didn’t have Peeve and Ranger, so the situation is not the same.

So Stress is still there, but I go along. Friday and Saturday, alcohol helped, but every morning Stress reminded me that it was there, accompanied by its friend, Headache.

I used to love Stress. I strived off Stress. Athletic event, tests, dates – whatever it was, Stress didn’t bother me. And with past jobs I’ve had, the stress of a newspaper deadline isn’t really stress for me at all. But now I hate Stress. I want it to go away, but it seems to have other plans.

Stress is a pain.

Some days, I hate being an adult.