The fun never stops

We'd dearly love to have lunch today with our friends at the newspaper, but we're up to our elbows in last-minute fixups before Maria flees to Arkansas tomorrow morning.
We're painting the kitchen and waiting for a call from the Subaru dealer to tell us we can come pick up our Forester.
We took it in on Wednesday for an oil change and lube and to find out what the "check engine" light was trying to tell us. It was telling us we had a faulty knock sensor, which is about a $100 item. Later, they called and said we also need a front-end brake job and, oh by the way, our head gasket is leaking and we need a new one.
The work - minus the insanely expensive head gasket job - will be about $700. The service manager opined the car will get Maria to Arkansas and she can have the head gasket replaced there.
Meantime, my '94 Honda del Sol is less than 100 miles from the 200,000-mile mark and seems to be between catastrophic mechanical failures.
And now it's back to work.