You have to laugh or else you'll cry

So a lot of people know the story, but for the record here is the brief version of the weekend's (continuing) ordeal.

Saturday afternoon we dropped Penny off at my parents and drove out to Concord for Liz's 30th birthday. It was fun while we were there, but I started feeling sick and so we left early and headed back home. Between Vacaville and Dixon on HWY80 the car broke down. It was 12:30am, cold, a little rainy, and we were over a mile from the next exit. We call my brother who looks up a local tow company and we're towed to the next exit where we park our car in front of a repair shop. Nic comes out from Sac to pick us up and drive us home (the cost to tow the car home would have been over $200, as it was it cost us $85 to tow it 2 miles).

Sunday nothing happens because nothing is open.

Monday my Dad takes me out to Dixon to drop off the key so the repair shop can attempt to read the code and tell us what's wrong with the car.

At this point we're hoping that it has something to do with the fuel filter or injector or something related to when we ran out of gas 2 weeks ago since that would be a pretty easy fix.

Nope. The hybrid battery needs to be replaced. The repair owner read the code, called his buddy who works at a Toyota dealership in LA and his buddy said it sounds like the hybrid battery is out which could run us anywhere between $2,500 - $4,500 to fix.

Ouch.

I don't know why the range is so high, but that's what we were told.

So today Bryan & my brother are using my parent's truck to tow the car back to Sacramento where we'll take it to a dealership and see what we can do. Best case scenario, they take the car give us enough credit to cover what we still owe (which is about $2,500) and then we can get a new car (well, new to us). Maybe even something a little bigger since New Baby will be here in a few months...

Worst case scenario: we have to fix the car and magic the money from somewhere... somehow.

To top it all off, I borrowed my parents truck to go to work and briefly got stuck in the mud coming home from work. I had to laugh, otherwise I probably would have sat there and sobbed.

It's been a stressful and pretty crappy couple of days. So if you have some good thoughts to spare please send them our way and hope with us that we end up with the best case scenario today at the dealership.