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in the car until it starts
Saturday, August 22 2009
Gretchen was gone to the Finger Lakes for the weekend, leaving me alone by myself with just the dogs and cats and a Subaru in case I wanted to go elsewhere. At some point I did want to go elsewhere, but after I'd put on a shirt and loaded up the dogs, I found that the car wouldn't start. Not having any other car for use as a source of a jump, I began charging the battery using the 12 volt rail of an old computer power supply. This looked like it was going to take forever, and having forgotten that the Subaru has a manual transmission and I live at the top of a hill, I found an old car battery I'd yanked in disgust from one of the other cars during some particularly bad winter cold snap. The battery hadn't been used in over a year, but on a hot August day it still had enough of a charge to start the car.
During the entire multi-hour period when I was trying to start the car, Sally refused to leave it.
I soon found out why the car's battery had gone dead. There was some problem in the electrical system causing the lights in the four corners to blink as they do when the hazard button is pushed in, but in a somewhat more chaotic way, and it may not have been the same lights. It was an unstoppable phenomenon, happening whether the car was on or off. The blinking continued as I went about my business in town: going to the bank to get $100 cash, going to the liquor store so I'd have a bottle of white wine to drink by myself while watching my teevee shows, and going to the Home Depot to buy a cheap 32 gallon trash can to use as a composting bin for my first generation of flushless poop-devouring toilet. It turned out that this blinking was actually being caused by the keyless entry system and was easily stopped just by using the keyless system a couple times. I normally leave the car unlocked and rarely have occasion to wirelessly unlock it.
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