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So, um, a day after expressing my extreme thanks for being able to pay my mortgage/monthly bills in full and on time, the payroll gods at Joe's company decided to piss all over my gratitude. See, a couple of Joe's hours got filed incorrectly, so instead of contacting him or his manager to straighten out the situation, they just decided to deduct 80 hours worth of work from a check that was supposed to have retro pay for something else that was processed incorrectly back in JULY. On a day when I was expecting a decent-sized check that would give us a little bit of money for the holidays, we actually received a check that totalled $253. Which is significantly less than even his normal two-week, after-tax pay. Which pretty much sucks. And because it was a holiday, and Joe was one of the only people from his department working on Friday, the situation can't even get resolved until Tuesday or Wednesday. Super!

To compound things, yesterday we went to spend the day with Joe's grandmother and brother in Bethlehem. It's been a while since we'd gotten up that way, and we had a fantastic time. But when we went to leave, we discovered that my Beckett, the 1998 Saturn SL1 that I've adored and defended since I purchased it in 2001, was dead. Archie, Joe's brother, is a mechanical engineer, but after two hours of tinkering with various parts of the car, he still couldn't definitively say what was wrong with it. So we decided we'd have it towed to a shop. Only, guess who never opened her welcome packet from AAA? If I had opened it, when it arrived back in JULY, I would've noticed that they'd processed my membership as basic instead of plus. I'd wanted the plus membership because it entitles you to three tows a year up to 100 miles, and since we do visit Bethlehem fairly regularly, and since Bethlehem is 92 miles from our driveway, we figured it would be a good investment.

Instead of having the car towed back to DE, we opted to have it towed to Joe's family's trusted auto mechanic Bobby Stevens, whose shop is within the five free miles my crappy basic AAA membership entitles me to. This meant that Grammy had to race us to Lehigh International Airport at 10:40 p.m., so we could grab a rental before the Hertz kiosk closed at 11. This also means a return trip to Bethlehem on Thursday, to pick up my car, which should (hopefully) be repaired by then. Because of the rental fee, and because I don't know how much fixing Beckett is going to cost, and because of the ridiculous $253 paycheck, I'm pretty much out of the holiday shopping game for the next week or so. Possibly longer.

So much for Cyber Monday.

The upside? My "economy" rental is a fully loaded Chevy Cobalt that has power everything, a huge GPS monitor, and rides smoothly and quietly. Do I have to give it back? Every time I'm in a rental I realized just how far cars have come since 1998. Too bad it's going to be another decade before I can afford a new one.

Funniest moment of the evening: me kicking Beckett's tires and saying, "Eff you, Beckett! I've loved you and defended you for years! And this is how you repay me, you p.o.s. car?"

Sigh.

In less depressing news, all of us have been mightily amused by the situation going on in my mother's small, tucked away neighborhood. It's two circles, something like thirteen houses, and everyone loves how private the place is. Seriously, it's hard to even give people directions to my mom's house, because it's that tucked away. Anyway, a new family recently moved in, and apparently they were known in their old neighborhood for their over-the-top Christmas displays and music-choreographed light shows. My mom's been calling me with daily updates, telling me what new additions have been made and how the family keeps saying there's even more to come. Then Friday, when she's out walking the dogs, she sees they've put up a barber poll with a web address on one side and a radio station on the other. Not only had the family expanded their previous