New Serpentine Belt

I put a new serpentine belt in my car yesterday. I didn't have the correct tool I needed, a 19mm torque socket wrench, but thanks to Nextdoor.com I found a nearby neighbor who let me borrow one. This was my first time changing a serpentine belt and it went a lot easier than I was expecting, taking less than half an hour. Once I was done I started up my car and there was no more squealing!

The Closing of Kmart and Sears

Our local Kmart and Sears stores are both closing, which is kind of sad. They weren't the best stores in the world... or in the town... but I enjoyed getting free and heavily discounted stuff with the Shop Your Way program. I would usually play their sweeps games in the evening while watching TV and end up with about $10-$15 every couple weeks, enough to purchase various household necessities. Sometimes they would offer Surprise Points, which they now call Free Cash, that would get me other stuff for free or very cheap. The program wasn't that great and often had restrictions that weren't listed, but it was still nice to get free toilet paper or dish soap or whatever. Twice I even ended up really winning the sweepstakes! The first time I won some exercise equipment like a weight set, mini trampoline, jump rope, kettle bells, an exercise watch, and probably some other things I can't think of. I kept and used some of the things, gave others away, and sold the rest.

The other sweepstakes I won was called the SHC ONLY: FOR THE HOLIDAYS and the prize for that was a $100 in points... except that they never gave me the points and I assume none of the other 4 winners got theirs either. When checking the status of the sweeps it used to say that it was pending as they were contacting the winners, but then it changed to "We didn't get enough completed entries into this Sweepstakes within the time allotted, therefore a winner will not be chosen". The official rules don't mention anything about a minimum number of entries so I call shenanigans! The Shop Your Way (info@shopyourway.com) people said I needed to contact sweeps@searshc.com, so I did. Many, many times. But I never received a response and info@shopyourway.com had no other contact information and wouldn't do anything to help. So that was frustrating and disappointing... kind of like the closing of these stores.