Not the best start to the week....

Saturday - My car overheated and stopped running, but just as we were pulling into the driveway.  Not too bad.

Sunday - I woke up with the cold everyone else has had.  It is a head cold with a super nasty headache and a crazy amount of sleepiness.  I spent all day in pjs.  Doing a lot of lying around again today.

Monday - Stella had trouble with being left again.  She carried on for about 30min and finally decided I wasn't going to take her with me and I was going to leave, so she went to class.  She decided she needed to snuggle (get a hug) if she started to cry.  Miss Miki said that would be just fine.  There was one more episode of crying and then she was fine the rest of the day.

I went and peeped (hung out with my peeps - it's what we do when we send the kids to quasi school) and then did a bunch of errands.  Found out what I need to do to get a new Driver's License since mine is NOT turning up.  I did some Girl Scout stuff, made an appt for my car, and called in the final tax numbers.  Going pretty well, I headed out to do the last two houses from last week armed with the code for the gate of the one that was unreachable last week.  That's where things went downhill for the day.

You see, I had Brian's car as mine wasn't working.  He had gotten a ride into work and was hopefully getting a ride home.  I drove 3 miles up the side of the mountain, entered the gate code and proceeded.  The roads were washboard-y and rutted, but dry.

The roads were not this nice

I didn't see the house yet, so I kept driving.  The roads started turning to snow, ice and mud.  There was no where to turn around.  The road was one narrow lane with rocks, trees, cliffs, etc on the sides.  Not somewhere you can do a y-turn in a giant sedan.  There weren't many driveways, and those that were there, were unplowed, muddy and steep as well.  I kept going thinking that the road must loop around. 

Not this nice either, sadly

Nope.  It dead ended in a "cul de sac."  I attempted to turn around and was stuck.  I rocked back and forth.  I emptied the car and trunk of anything that might give traction.  I gathered sticks and rocks to put under the tires.  Nope, I was stuck.

Ok, it wasn't nearly this bad.

Ok, I am out in the middle of nowhere behind horsetooth on a private road where you need a code to get in.  No one knows exactly where I am, just vaguely that I'm doing houses this afternoon.  I have no cell reception.  The few houses that are in this "subdivision" are mostly summer vacation homes.  I need to pick my kids up in less than an hour.  Brian has no car to get them even if I COULD get a hold of him.  He has no car to pull me out, doesn't know how to get to where I am, doesn't know where I am, doesn't know the gate code.  Stella's freaked out by being left at school and here I'm not going to show up to pick her up.  I've abandoned her.

I started to cry. 

And I started to walk.  The first driveway had a couple who do live there year round (with their dog and cat, who I got to pet - and experience the calming effect of petting animals.  It's not total, but that unconditional love does help.)  The wife taught at Front Range and could give me a ride.  They had a phone that worked (with Skype) and let me call the quasischool who got someone to take the girls (which they loved - thank you so very, very much, Deanna) and called Brian.  Then, the husband was able to pull out the car so I could escape the mud hell that was my life for the last hour or so.

That night, after delivering my car to the shop, I drank TWO beers.  That, according to my children, is getting drunk.  So I guess I was drunk last night, though it didn't really seem that way to me.  It did relax me some, I was a bit tightly wound.

Tuesday - Slept late, woke with a worse headache, which made me really glad I had canceled Girl Scouts.  Got the call on about my car.  Water pump, timing belt, ty rods, assorted seals and whatnot.  Damage? $1200-1300.  Crap.  Well, at least the tax refund will be submitted tomorrow.  It'll be a bit tight until that comes in but we'll make it.  Somehow we always do.

Now, it's time for a nap.  I've done my meager duties that had to be done today - girl scout emails, submitting the houses, making my kids clean up various messes they had made, made them also do something productive (no, Sandis, watching How I Met Your Mother is not educational.)  So yep, it's naptime.