Man, G.

It's like as if all the fucking bad juju I managed to live through the last couple years somehow made its way to your door. The sheer degree of "OF COURSE YOU DID!" whenever something goes wrong is utterly palpable.

Not that I'm entire free myself. You would think that a grinding "rawrrawrrawrrawr" sound from the passenger-front side of a car means "Tire issue - investigate ASAP, possible replacement needed", right?

Keep in mind, I'd just done a fair bit of much needed replacing of parts and servicing: front and rear struts, tierod ends, control arms all replaced, clutch job along with master and slave cylinders, passenger side inner CV joint rebuilt because of cracked boot, front and rear main seals replaced, and RTV sealant redone for rear main seal assembly, oil pan, and timing chain cover. (Why yes, I did pull the engine and transmission out together. Why do you ask~? :P )

Tires checked and balanced... still noisy.
Replaced tire... still noisy.
Alignment done... needed, but still noisy...
Replace CV axle (suspect due to cracked boot)... ...you gotta be fucking kidding me - STILL NOISY!?

At this point, its going to be one of two things - the CV support bearing on the intermediate shaft, or the wheel bearing in the passenger side steering knuckle. So far, my investigation online points towards the intermediate shaft bearing... but knowing my luck, it's probably gonna wind up being something absurd like some part in the differential is going bad... which would fucking suck big brass ones because that will mean a transaxle rebuild. And just after I got done doing all that other work, too!

At the very least, people in my apartment complex are goddamned impressed with how I've absolutely gone to town on my little Saturn SC1. While I've been at it, I've also replaced the front and rear bumpers (severely damaged some years by sudden unexpected LAKE ON THE GODDAMNED INTERSTATE HIGHWAY!!!), the front seats (utterly worn and nasty - managed to upgrade by snagging much nicer seats from more recent vintage SC1), and a bunch of other various little things.

On top of all this, I now have to be careful about how and how much I eat because now I apparently have gallstones. And with me having the freakish liver from hell that'll metabolize narcotics like its nobody's business combined with a relatively high pain threshold (thank you ever so much, abusive childhood!) I have to tell the ER nurses to not waste precious Morphine on me (I will literally not even feel it) and just skip straight to the Dilaudid.

Fortunately, they gave me a prescription of Tylenol-3 for flareups. Doesn't happen often, though, because I've been fairly paranoid about my eating habits ever since. Mostly I wind up using it to help out with the arthritis in my cervical spine because the 500mg Naproxen Sodium tabs they prescribed me barely manage to take the edge off. BIG DIFFERENCE between an anti-inflammatory and an actual pain reliever. Though they definitely work best together than just one or the other.

It's been slow progress, but progress all the same. Just that for once I wish I could do a major repair on a vehicle without having some ridiculous BS stymie me.

Suffice to say, I definitely know the feeling when it seems the universe itself is trying to stack the deck against you. (For a while, shit was so bad for me that my hard-ass, Type-A persona, self-made-man of a step-father who was terribly fond of setting ridiculous double-standards between me and my half/step-siblings was all "GodDAMN son, that's fucked.")