Expensive week

Wednesday morning I took the car into the Toyota shop. Our car is 19 years old and has 208,000 kms. While we really didn't need it when we got it for basically nothing in 2000, the addition of 3 children has made having a car extremely practical.

In recent months it has had a hard time climbing up hill. They took a quick look at it at the dealer and said that it was a problem with the "embrayage," which has something to do with the clutch and transmission. The part itself is around 400 euros and the estimated labor makes the repair around 1,100 euros ($1,500). Because of Paris traffic, this type of repair is fairly common. While this is expensive, it's still cheaper than trying to replace the car, which runs well otherwise.

Our car won't be done for another 2 weeks, so we're temporarily carless. So much for taking some outside of Paris trips during next week's school vacation.

Our dishwasher is also having problems and currently no water goes into the machine. I'm going to try to tinker with it later. But this also might require a service call from Darty and a replacement part.

So, this is looking to be an expensive week. Fortunately, we are savers more than spenders, so we've been saving up money for rainy weeks like this one. God provides in different ways, including through savings accounts.