battery mayhem

Remember how I left the Honda’s lights on for like three seconds in Chapel Hill a couple of weeks ago and killed the battery and we had to get it jumped off? Because even though it’s been weak for ages and I’ve killed it more than once leaving the lights on a few minutes and so has Baker B, we are most certainly not the type of people who would ever consider wasting our precious time on silly things like preventive maintenance? I mean, honestly. Our motto is "Never even vaguely consider fixing it until it’s 300% dead. And you’re stranded. And maybe don’t even do it then if there is the slightest possibility it can be revived, ghostly and faint though it may be." So of course we don’t buy the $100 battery from the AAA guy because hey, we can get one at Auto Zone for waaaaay less that that!

Which would be fine if we would actually bestir ourselves to go get one from Auto Zone when we get back to town. But why would we do that, when it still has something like 6% of its life left? Why, that would be wasteful! And, more important, that would take time and effort. (Let me just note right here that this car is nine years old and as far as I know it’s never had a new battery. So I’m really not kidding about that 6%.)

I’m sure you can see where this is going. Wednesday I got in the car after work and… it wouldn’t turn over. Baker B had to come back and get me (and lucky for me I managed to catch him at home – he was going hiking and of course has no cell phone – and if he did have one it would either be turned off or the battery would be dead) and we decided to just leave the Honda on campus and mess with it the next day. So yesterday Baker B goes to Auto Zone and buys a battery, brings it back to campus and puts it in the Civic. Complete with much complaining and swearing and irritation at the hordes of chatting shrieking flip-flop wearing students swarming about.

He has a really hard time getting it in because for some reason it’s very difficult to get to the bolts with the wrench and get them turned. Then when he does get it in, the horn honks and nothing will work. So he realizes he’s got the cables reversed. And puts it in the right way (more swearing, more complaining, more irritation). And… it won’t start. Won’t turn over, and is stone dead.

So we leave it on campus again and plan to just call our best friends AAA today. And hope they can fix it, if the battery is perhaps not hooked up right. If not they can tow it. Because this could be a Very Very Bad Thing. Like a You Have Fried Your Electrical System, You Eedjits bad.

I’ll just mention here that Baker B HAS put batteries in before. Many times, in fact. The battery in his old Colt was always going dead, so it was a pretty routine thing for him to take it out, go get it charged, and put it back in. So it’s not like this was his first battery experience.

So today we got it towed in. I did some googling of battery issues and checked out the lovely, very funny and quite helpful Car Talk site and found that it COULD be a fuse blown. A fuse that’s designed to keep you from destroying your car’s electrical system by putting the battery in wrong. Or it could be the electrical system. I think he could also have killed the alternator, which would be less bad than the entire electrical system. The guy at the shop was not very encouraging. I was hoping for, "oh, don’t worry, it’s just a fuse!" and what he said was more along the lines of "Wow, that was a really really really stupid thing to do and you may have fried your electrical system!!" Fortunately these guys have been around forever and my coworker D adores them and says they’re insanely honest and she trusts them to fix her elderly mother’s car. She’s known them for about a bazillion years. So I don’t think they’ll tell us it’s the electrical system and charge us a thousand dollars for the electric system but put a ten dollar fuse in.

So. Send my car good thoughts. Good "it’s just a fuse" thoughts.

Then when we stopped at the grocery store on the way home from work, I was digging in my bag for change to buy a paper, and my cellphone came flying out of the bag and plummeted to the sidewalk. CRASH. The back of the phone came off, the battery flew out, I swore like a sailor – in all the years I’ve had a cellphone, I have NEVER EVER dropped it. EVER. Of course, I don’t use it that often either, but still. I’m so careful with it and I don’t drop it. I have a little clear plastic cover on it to keep from scuffing it up, though, lucky for me, because I think that’s the only thing that saved it from breaking into a zillion pieces. The battery side of the cover flew off but it must have cushioned the blow, because to my astonishment, once I got the battery back in and the cover back on – it worked fine. It’s not even scratched, bizarrely.

I’m hoping that is a sign that my car is also okay, and it’s just the fuse. That the fuse protected the battery, like my clear plastic case protected my cellphone. It did seem kind of odd to have two battery-related crisis’ in one day. One flying battery, one mis-inserted battery.

Well, I’ll leave you with some pictures I took at Price Lake, on the Parkway last night. And tomorrow I am getting back to my Old Photo Project, no matter what.

Fun with Sepia! I was impressed at how much nicer these steps are in sepia. In real life they’re just plain old hunks of wood.

And this was in Blowing Rock, where things are blooming at last-