apparently I have bad karma

Technology has reared its ugly head and snarled at me yet again.

Let's start with my car. On Sunday, I drove Katie to theater practice. While she was getting out of the car, my check oil light came on, but it was blinking, like a turn signal. I'm going to be honest and own up to the fact that I haven't had the oil changed since I bought the car in February. But I've also only driven 5,000 miles in it, and it was changed shortly before I bought it. Then the light came on again when I was stopped at a traffic light, but once I started driving again, it went away. Friggin weird, right? Since then, I've driven and it hasn't been a problem. So my dad I checked my oil yesterday and I'm at the maximum level of oil. Huh. He's part of some online car forum thing, so he poked around to see if anyone else had a similar issue. Basically what it boils down to is this:

Option A: The oil pump is dying.
Option B: The engine is dying.
Option C: There's a problem with the indicator thingy. (clearly I don't know much about cars).

I'm hoping for C. Or maybe A. But not B!! If my engine dies, that's it. That's the death of my Sebring. :( So for the time being, I'm being extra nice to my car. I'm praying that since the light hasn't come on again, it was just an indicator thingy problem. And even though it's a car and not a person, I really can't handle any more loss in my life. (side note: WHY THE CRAP IS MY KEYBOARD ONLY REGISTERING EVERY FEW LETTERS I TYPE?!?!? ADD: BASTARD LAPTOP TO THE LIST!!)

Oh, and did I mention that starting in December I now have to start paying my own car insurance? Not a big deal, except that my insurance is over $100 a month because of that goddamn accident last year. Seriously, I hate ice. This winter I plan on never driving. We'll see how that works out. But at this point, if my car kicks the bucket, I may just say "Eff it all! and pack up my things and move to a city in Florida with really nice public transportation. I don't know what city that is, but I'm going to move there. Just you wait, Henry Higgins!

Onto my next issue: I play The Sims 3. A lot. Especially because my internet at home is sketchy if I'm downstairs (ADD THAT TO THE LIST OF WHY MY COMPUTER IS A BASTARD). Unfortunately, this means that I get bored with the game sometimes. So I was reading on thesims3.com forums a suggestion to erase all the pre-made simmies in a town and put in people and families that I had made. So I did! It was a lot of fun, and took a majority of my time yesterday. I even made a chart in a notebook so I could keep track of everyone.

And then... Patch 1.6.6 came out! The first expansion pack is set to come out today (World Adventures... yay!) and so was a new patch for the game. 1.5 was supposed to be for the base game and 1.6 was for people with the new expansion pack. Except EA is dumb and didn't think that November 17th would start for some people in the US very early, compared to those on the West Coast (i.e. where they all are... self-centered idiots). So many people in the Eastern time zone had this patch made available to them before the expansion pack was even released! What's worse is that the updater didn't even make patch 1.5 available... just 1.6. I hadn't even heard of 1.5. So last night I installed 1.6 and now... I can't save the town I spent ALL day yesterday working on! There's some stupid error 16 message that keeps coming up, and in the readme file, the error messages only go up to 15. Cruel. I'm actually kind of lucky that this is the only problem I'm having. People have lost entire legacy families where the sim who was 'alive' was the great-great-great-grandson of the original. Apparently mods (which I guess I installed one and didn't know it!) and custom content (which I have probably over 200 files of...) cause BIG issues with this patch.

And now thesims3.com forums aren't working. Probably because EA realizes that they MESSED UP.

So now here's my debate. Do I uninstall the game and reinstall with no mods/cc? I mean, I have the info on all of those families I made yesterday, and I don't ever go back and play old games. Or do I uninstall just the mod that I have? (ironically, it's a mod designed to help ease the process of installing custom content.) I can't even ask advice from fellow simmers because the forums aren't up right now.

Even though it's Tuesday, which means that NCIS is on tonight, I'm still super bummed about everything. I would like to crawl into a hole and hide from the world until I die. That would be fantastic. :(

Oh, and the crack dream I had last night isn't helping things either. I dreamed that Bill and I went back to UD to visit, and he started playing hackey sack with some old friends, until the hackey sack hit him in the face and got lodged BEHIND his eyeball. I know that's not even possible, but I am seriously freaking out right now. And then I went to find Jen and tell her about the Sebring (since it was her car at one point) and she had joined some super snobby sorority (which just happened to be called Zeta Beta Zeta... I haven't even watched Greek in about 2 weeks!) and she wasn't allowed to talk to me anymore.

I have issues.

~Christine