My son Arturo is a genius. He’s always on the computers and says he wants to be an astronaut. One day I caught him looking up out of the window, half his body hanging out.  I asked him why and he said “I like to stick my head out the window and smile for a satellite picture.” Then he showed me that on the Internet, but I didn’t see his head.

He sure didn’t get his brains from his father. That man completely spent his last paycheck on lottery tickets. I said, “Xavier, how are we going to pay for our car and health insurance this month” after none of the tickets won. He didn’t have an answer and good thing he didn’t.

I had to find some money for the insurances so I had my daughter help me find a car title loans company.  We went to Waukegan Title Loans, which got us our cash in two days.  That was exactly what we needed.  If I’m going to raise an astronaut, I have to keep the bills paid!

By the way Waukegan is near Gurnee, Lake Bluff, North Chicago, Wadsworth, Waukegan, and Wintrop Harbor.

I’ve adopted a new philosophy lately.  It’s that good news is just life’s way of keeping you off balance.

I mean, who isn’t used to bad news these days?  The governor was a crook.  Everyone’s getting laid off.  Half the neighborhood is for sale or in foreclosure. The banks don’t loan money anymore.

We ran into an itsy, bitsy problem last summer with our boat. Some kids stole it from the dock, were doing figure 8s in the lake, then crashed into another dock on shore.  Damage to the other dock: $1000.  Medical costs for one of the kids: $4200. The fact we got sued: priceless.

So we had to hire a lawyer to defend the fact our boat was a theft target. In the end, we won, but that wasn’t before about $2500 in legal costs.  Which my friend says coulda been worse. This was not extra cash we had just sitting in a cookie jar.  So my husband looked into where we could borrow some and finally hit on the idea of a car title loan.  We went to Round Lake Title Loans because it was fast and easy and could be done online. It was the only good news in the whole scenario, the fact that someone said we had something of value and that we deserved to get $2500 out of it.

Round Lake is also near Highland Park, Highwood, North Chicago, Waukegan, and Zion.

My grandmother always said, “never answer an anonymous letter.”  That’s the kind of advice we need here in the Internet era.

My sister never listened to grandma.  She is one of those people who got an email from some guy in Kenya who convinced her to give him her bank account numbers.  She thought she was getting $10,000; instead, she lost $670.  Loser!  I barely feel sorry for her, everyone’s heard about that scam.  Oh wait, maybe not if you spend every waking moment watching American Idol, America’s Got Talent, Deal or No Deal, Are You Smarter than a 6th Grader (she’s not).

So that little problem cut her short on cash, boo hoo hoo.  My concern was she already owed ME $300 (yes, stupidity runs in the family). And she needed to fix her car so she could hold onto her job.  So I told her she needed a car title loan.  Of course that took some ‘splainin, but she went online herself (shocking) and found North Chicago Title Loans, where she got $900 for that old Saturn of hers.  She paid me back, got her battery replaced, and kept working down at Gurnee Mills.

And I think she learned a lesson in all of this.  We can only hope.

By the way North Chicago is near, Waukegan, Lake Bluff, Gurnee, Wadsworth, and Beach Park.

Because I’m a man, when I lock my keys in the car I will fiddle with a wire clothes hanger and ignore my girlfriend’s suggestions that we call a road service until long after hypothermia has set in.

And because I’m a man, I held onto that “flip” property I bought in Waukegan, holding out for a better price back in late 2007, not realizing the market would crash and I’d be holding this over-renovated gem that I’m now renting out at a $600 loss per month. And because of that, I wasn’t able to afford to fix the Infinity when all the brakes needed replacing and my credit cards were maxed out.

But because I’m a man, I don’t cry. I don’t give up. I don’t give in to loser thinking. I took to the wires, the Internet, to find the solution to this little problem (getting my car working enough that I could continue driving to my job in Glenview without having to carpool with Clay, that annoying guy in HR who lives west of the 94).

That’s where this man, this person of honor and integrity and creative problem solving, found Lake Bluff Title Loans, a car title loan company that allows me to use my car’s value to pay for car repairs. (You can use car title loans for anything, but in my case it was the car itself.)

A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.

By the way, Lake Bluff is near North Chicago, Park City, Libertyville, Lincolnshire, and Lake Forest.