Booknook

I mentioned that last night the truck very suddenly started sputtering and running extremely rough, and the check engine light came on.

We took the truck over to a local auto parts store to get a read on the code for the check engine light. They said the most likely culprit was an ignition coil, causing misfires in one of the cylinders. That was one of the potential things I'd seen on the list of possible causes for the rough idle. Pretty firmly on the lower end of the middle of "how fucked are we," so that was a relief. (So glad it wasn't "fuel pump" money.)

So we took it to the usual shop we use. They said they wouldn't be able to get to it tomorrow, and they would have to do their own diagnostic rather than relying on the code, which was fine. They'd give me a call tomorrow morning to let me know the results of their diagnostic and talk costs and recommendations and such.

Mom loaned us her second car, since Taylor doesn't typically go in to the office anymore, so we could get around until then.

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Turned out Jaspurr was at the vet (same vet that we were at yesterday) for surgery. :( Poor boy had a lump on his abdomen, so they were removing and biopsying it.

Got the excellent news that it was just a fatty lump, and did not need to be biopsied!

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I was just about to take a nap, when the auto place called. They were able to get it in today (initially I was told it was the main tech's day off, so couldn't get it looked at until tomorrow; apparently someone else was available today!)

They did not think it was the ignition coil, they thought it was the spark plugs. They wanted to replace the spark plugs plus do an injector system service. I misheard the initial quote and thought it was super high, like four figures; it was not, haha. It was within the general range I'd been expecting. (Which I wasn't *delighted* to pay, but when I balked at my misheard price, he offered a discount to bring it down slightly, ha.)

They got the work done by the end of the afternoon, but when he called back he said the spark plugs hadn't fixed the issue... because it turned out it was the ignition coil. *Facepalm* (They say that the coil was fine when they tested it earlier, because they swapped a good coil for the potentially bad one, and the problem persisted, which was why they'd ruled it out; maybe the coil and a spark plug both failed?)

They replaced the spark plugs and the ignition coil. He gave us the coil at-cost (which was cheaper than we could have gotten it if we'd bought it ourselves; we priced them at the auto parts place when we got the code read) and didn't charge any extra labor for it. He also completely comped the system service that they did, so the total wound up only being $14 over the original estimate. In exchange for the discount, he just asked that we leave a nice review, which I did.

The truck is now running fine! It might be even smoother than it was prior to the problem starting last night; it hadn't been having issues that made me want to take it in, but occasionally a little roughness that I wasn't noticing this evening. So perhaps that coil had been on the way out for a while.

Not the best timing in the world, and I spent a good part of last night and this morning fighting through the chest pain and horrible nausea and prickling scalp of massive fucking anxiety, but I'm glad it's sorted out, that it didn't happen at a *worse* time.