Scammed, car troubles & the pen is mightier than, well, anything when applied to leather!

Aloha, everyone!  It's been a busy, and eventful week and so lest you think our life is perfect, here in paradise, I thought I would share a few of the crazy stressful things we encountered this week.

First we have to start out with our car that we named "The Panda"...

we found a car on the classified, a Dodge Neon 2005 for $1950 that seemed pretty good and after a few days of being put off by the guy selling the car "for a friend" , re-renting our rental car 2 more times, etc, we finally met up with "John" in Laie.  "John" happened to resemble a panda bear-Roundish, big guy that was nice but didn't like to communicate a whole lot.  In order to make that happen, Geoff drove our rental car to school, then drove it to the car rental place at the airport to drop it off, where cousin Matty so kindly met him after driving the hour down from Laie and then drove Geoff the hour back to Laie to meet with "John" and the car at "Food Land" (as Matty says, "they're really subtle with the names of stores here;) near BYU Hawaii.  "John" wasn't there at the arranged time and didn't get there for several hours!  Finally he showed up with the car and he, Matty & Geoff all loaded in the Neon so Geoff could drive it around the parking lot & test it out.  Geoff informed "John" that he would be breaking and accelerating to try things out but "John" didn't brace himself in anyway & was thrown into the dashboard & then looked at Geoff like he was a maniac!  (It was at this point where we realized "John" probably didn't speak English super well.) Matty was failing at supressing his giggles in the back seat.  Anyway, after all this Geoff decided to buy the car since we really had no choice with our rental car turned in, him an hour away from home & now place to get another car anywhere remotely close by!  He got home late that night.

The next morning & from every day since the car's check engine light flashes & it stalls at stop lights & in the middle of driving down the road!  We've taken it to the same nice mechanic 3 times now & it's been determined that it it was not the easy fixed the mechanic originally thought & will costs more than we bought the car to fix it!  Sigh...looks like we'll be selling it for what we can on the classifieds & finding something else.  Perhaps paying the big bucks to have our car in Utah, that we haven't sold yet, shipped over to us.  Let's just say we're hesitant to buy another car off the Hawaii Craigslist!

Randomly, the Panda came with 2 pairs of stinky shoes in the trunk, and some person's (not "John") paystubs for the past 6 months

If that weren't enough trouble, I also figured out that the vacation rental that I had booked for next month for us (we determined that we needed more time to figure out getting approved for a loan to buy a place & no one would rent to us for a shorter lease than a year, so another monthly vacation rental was what we were left with!  We can't stay in the one we're currently in because someone else has it booked Feb 1st and that would be way too easy!) is a scam!  Luckily I figured it was too late to call my bank & cancel the charges.  I  was worried it might be a scam and so I had the person text me their name, address & bank info so I could verify it with the front desk of the place we would be renting, which happened to be down the road.  Everything checked out & the front desk said it was the real owner but come to find out it was a scammer who just had all that poor owners information!  Anyway, I cancelled the payments through my bank, had someone contact the owner to let him know his information had been stolen and we're back to square one to  figure out where to move to in 9 days!  I do have some excellent leads though, which i didn't as of 10pm last night, so it looks like this cycle of craziness & miracles will continue for a little longer.  Thanks for the prayers!

Last, but not least, Aya, our cuter-than-you-can-imagine 3 year old got a hold of a ball point pen while we were entertaining our very first out of state guests, here in Hawaii (thanks so much for stopping by, Kristen & Brad. You guys are awesome!) she started coloring pictures on paper, which unfortunately was placed directly on top the lovely cream colored Italian leather sectional, that we have here in our vacation rental.  Before I realized any of this was going on she was drawing directly on the couch!  I wasn't too worried because surely trusty google wouldn't fail me on finding a way out of this mess, like it had so many times before...

When Aya saw me scrubbing at this she said "my sea horse!" in a horrified tone.

After 3 scrubbing sessions

Still a few more scrubbing sessions needed

well, I searched high & low & researched & called local cleaning companies & tried the Magic Eraser & Rubbing Alchohol & let me tell you, there is really no way to get out the ink with out discoloring the leather around it.  Sigh.  So, I called the lady we're renting from told her about all of my research and offered to buy the couch.  What else could we do?  The lady we're renting from don't have a lot of money & couldn't just eat the cost of the couch so after she looked into everything for a few days, she agreed that, that was the only thing to do.  Once we paid her for the couch I started scrubbing with the rubbing alcohol & have managed to almost get rid of the pen, after several "treatments" but now there are big white spots.  I'm going to see what I can do about carefully dying it back to the cream color & if it looks fabulous, sell it on Craigslist (yep, that's how we do business here in Hawaii) for what I bought it for, if it looks bad, I'll sell it on Craigslist for whatever we can get!  Anyone have any experience/ideas dealing with this?  (I know there are professional leather cleaners that will come to your home & bleach out the ink & re-stain the leather to match the rest of the couch for some crazy expensive fee, but none of them exist on our island, so that option's out.)

But just so you don't feel totally bad for us, here's a picture of how I got to spend my birthday afternoon! (A blog all about the birthday celebrations will be coming soon.)

Love you all!
p.s. Please forgive the crazy grammar, spelling etc.  I just type these as fast as possible & publish them with out a 2nd look because I just don't have the time to spare right now & my perfectionist self would never let me post them and that would be at odds with my must-keep-in-contact-with-all-the-people-I-love self & would cause extra stress none of us really need in our lives, right?