At least it's thursday

I am out of gas money. I stayed home after work, and baked chicken and watched the Owl cam.

On Tuesday, after I posted, I sneaked the car out onto the now-dirt road and went to see the mechanic. He had bad news.
First of all, the car backfiring at 2000 rpm was *not* because I loosened a spark plug wire by accident. He says I need further tuning of the chip.
(I was there on Saturday and we did a preliminary test of the chip and everything checked out *perfectly.* So why is it going bad now?)

His son can only do computer work on Saturdays. This Saturday is the first saturday without rain for AGES. So everyone is going to take their cars to the dyno, which is a big deal. His son can also tune the chip at the dyno, which is actually better because I can test it at racing speeds, but the shop with the dyno charges by the hour.

Secondly, he discovered that a wire was loose from the transmission, which made it not shift hard for the past week that I've been driving it! And I am very freaked out.
The car has been drivable, but if I had known I would NOT have driven it. And It did slip once on Friday, (which I chalked up to my overactive imagination) and also didn't go into reverse very well on Monday night... (I tried to pretend it was due to the parking brake) I even remember thinking, the Toyota shifts harder than this? But because I know I am paranoid, and haven't driven the car in 4 months, I really couldn't be sure...
I try very hard to conserve my transmission, it isn't easy not to burn it up with so much horsepower! So this was more than a little disappointing.
Needless to say I won't be driving it until the backfiring can be fixed, which is Sat, I HOPE. Any other problems will happen when they do.
Sigh.

I found another neat video from my favorite YouTube make-up artist, unfortunately I don't have $10 to see the new Tim Burton movie.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOCzQ3pKGvk&feature=popw00us0d