Hiiiii

I have a 2003 Corolla (it was my Grambone’s- she made it to 101 and a half years of life) and the check engine light came on and I took it to one of those places to run the diagnostics for free and it said the thermostat needs to be replaced-

How urgent is this? The car itself only has about 90K miles on it and my regular place charges $250 baseline for a check engine light and I’m getting ready to move in a couple months and I’m afraid to ignore it but also unsure I can afford it- what should I do?

Definitely get it done, but nobody will be offended if you get a few quotes for the work. You might be able to save a bit. Just call various places with decent reviews, tell them 03 Corolla thermostat replacement, they'll tell you how much. Don't drive it in the meantime if you can help it.

Things that will make it overheat include idling in traffic, especially with air conditioner going, or driving up steep hills.

My first conversation about PCOS with my new endocrine/OBGYN was about weight management and how that could improve my fertility when I eventually wanted kids. It wasn't asked what my goals were for my health or if I wanted kids, just assumed.

I was a hormonal, depressed mess. I hated my body. My body dysmorphia was so bad that I cloistered myself away from so much. I wore hoodies and jeans in the 90°F, 80% humidity summers. This was considered fine. I was given metformin and birth control pills and told this was all that could be done. That PCOS wouldn't affect my life until I wanted to be pregnant. I wasn't asked if I wanted to be pregnant, just assumed.

I don't know how many PCOS groups I joined on my early 20s hoping to find community and commonality for body dysmorphia and symptom management, only to be bombarded with fertility treatments and tips and 'inspirational conception' anecdotes. They never asked if I was attempting to conceive, just assumed.

Until one morning, maybe, when his mum held back even less of her usual resentment, and martin wasn't awake enough to pretend it didn't hurt, he very intentionally stomps on just one crack in the pavement, right outside their flat in an act of useless rebellion. It feels petty and satisfying, though, and acknowledges the thought he has occasionally about whether his mum would ever do anything as convoluted and inconvenient for him as he does for her. He walks the rest of the way to school like normal, timing his steps just perfectly, and doesn't think about it again until he crosses over the threshold of his school and immediately feels a wave of dread come over him.

How could he?

The rest of the day he's all but sure that every footstep in the hallway is the vice principal coming to tell him that something's happened to his mum, that she's in the hospital again and this time it's all his fault. He can't pay attention to anything other than the pit in his stomach and the sweat on his palms as he internally scolds himself over and over for being such an awful, thoughtless child.

Ultimately, though, after hours of unintelligible lectures from his teachers and an unappetizing lunch he only choked down with the guilty thought of not knowing when his next meal would be with mum back in the hospital, he walks home, once again avoiding every crack as though it'd make the difference between finding his mum in an angry heap on the floor or finding her not even breathing at all.

But as he opens the door to their grimy little flat, the TV's on like normal, and his mum sits in front of it, taking measured breaths that she won't waste on greeting him. After a few startled blinks, he shuts the door quietly, tiptoes past her chair, and closes himself in his room. The rest of the evening is spent grateful that he taught himself to cry quietly. He wouldn't want to disturb her any more than he already has today.

Working in retail is really fun, and the times when major fuck-ups happen, they can be either anxiety-attack inducing, or make it possible to get through the rest of your god-awful shift with a smile depending on the customer. My all-time favorite absolute fuck-up is as follows:

This kind woman is just doing her thing. She scans her membership card from her keychain. The register beeps to acknowledge the scan. We continue as usual. Neither of us notice right away, but after I’ve scanned a few more items, I hear a very quiet, “Um,” from the lady, very polite. I look at her. She is looking at the screen of my register, blinking. I, too, look.

And lo and behold. There is a charge of over four-thousand dollars ($4,000) worth of garlic bread staring us in the face. There are no words for a minute. We’re just… in awe. How did this happen? How the hell did this happen?

She didn’t even have garlic bread in her cart.

I sputter a partial apology - I was incapable of forming actual sentences in the moment - and try to void the garlic bread. Since there was no garlic bread to scan, I try to manually remove $4,000-some from this transaction.

Well, the registers don’t like it when you try to void off more than five dollars ($5) from a transaction, so naturally it pings my manager for confirmation, but she’s not by her pager.

At this point, both myself and the lady are just… dumbfounded. She’s not even mad. I’m not even all that embarrassed. Both of us are just looking at the screen. There’s a bit of laughter, but it’s mostly just… confusion.

I have to call through the whole store for my manager on the intercom because she’s not answering. She shows up, ready to override and void it, when she too, sees what exactly is being voided.

“What… did you do?”

“I genuinely. Have literally. No. Idea.”

She voids it, and I go to finish the transaction and tell the woman her total (minus the garlic bread). My register pings. It tells me that she hasn’t scanned her membership card. Odd. I distinctly remember her doing that. The woman goes to scan her card again, and I notice that her library card is stuck to her membership card. I tell her gently, and she separates the two and scans her card.

My manager, hovering nearby still, sees this and says, “I think it mistook the barcode of her other card for garlic bread, and the remaining digits were read as the price.”

And that’s when the laughter really came over us. There were no hard feelings at all. In fact, the woman was incredibly glad that the receipt still showed the garlic bread and the voiding of. I will remember it until the end of time, my only regret in the entire situation being that I didn’t take a damn picture, because she has proof and I don’t. But I swear to God it happened.