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Last weekend, Bernie the 20-year-old Berlingo refused to start: dead battery. We walked through snow so deep we had to wade instead and bought an edited smaller version of our shopping list.
Wax didn't want to ask the tenant for a jumpstart (there have been weird passive-aggressive notes) and so she tasked me to buy a battery starter from the store where I work.
She texted me too late Wednesday (her day off), so I ended up bringing it home Thursday, and Thursday we had a massive snowstorm. Wax worked Friday and Saturday, and nobody felt up to trying to work out the battery starter when it was pitch black outside while standing in a foot of snow.
However, in the meantime, due to the abbreviated shopping list I mentioned before, we ran out of fresh salad ingredients for the bunnies and had to walk to the store last night to get more.
But today is Wax's day off, so a couple of hours before sunset we managed to lever ourselves up out of the sofa and into our outer garments and try to deal with the battery starter.
You'd think we should, then, be more careful next time, since this situation is born of the battery first getting drained, and then being outside for a week below freezing. But we actually don't know HOW the battery got drained. We weren't aware of leaving the lights on or anything. It's a mystery. And next you would think we should maybe be more careful of Bernie by using the garage in winter so he wouldn't be constantly exposed to the elements, but:
Wax didn't want to ask the tenant for a jumpstart (there have been weird passive-aggressive notes) and so she tasked me to buy a battery starter from the store where I work.
She texted me too late Wednesday (her day off), so I ended up bringing it home Thursday, and Thursday we had a massive snowstorm. Wax worked Friday and Saturday, and nobody felt up to trying to work out the battery starter when it was pitch black outside while standing in a foot of snow.
However, in the meantime, due to the abbreviated shopping list I mentioned before, we ran out of fresh salad ingredients for the bunnies and had to walk to the store last night to get more.
But today is Wax's day off, so a couple of hours before sunset we managed to lever ourselves up out of the sofa and into our outer garments and try to deal with the battery starter.
Today, Sunday, Trying to Deal with the Battery Starter
- We opened the package and discovered there was sort of a diagram, but no instructions really. I looked at the car manual, but there weren't really any instructions there either - just for jumpstarts.
- So then we spent what felt like half an hour knocking snow off the car with a porch broom in my case and a snow scraper brush. By that time Wax's fingers were too numb with cold to work the latch on the hood, because she doesn't wear sheepskin mittens like me.
- We hooked up the little colored clamps in the correct order and then plugged it in with an outdoor extension cord, which was the only advice the booklet gave us. Error message! The booklet interpreted this (!) as 'cables attached wrong or short circuit'. Tried again. Nope.
- Wax googled it and learned that our (totally new!)(less than a year) battery might be permanently borked because it was empty outside in weather well below freezing for a week, which can cause stuff to, like, expand and explode in it.
You'd think we should, then, be more careful next time, since this situation is born of the battery first getting drained, and then being outside for a week below freezing. But we actually don't know HOW the battery got drained. We weren't aware of leaving the lights on or anything. It's a mystery. And next you would think we should maybe be more careful of Bernie by using the garage in winter so he wouldn't be constantly exposed to the elements, but:
- We'd have to empty it the rest of the way - the center of it is full of a huge pile of sewage-contaminated boxes and bits of wood from our tenant that she sorted out of her stuff after the garage flooded with sewage a couple months ago. We could just haul it to the dump ourselves. The flood is technically our fault. And we did say we'd put up some warehouse storage shelves for her stuff. This all takes energy and time though - we'd probably need two weeks of vacation to accomplish that much in our current empty battery state. We SHOULD do it, totally, it's just like - future plans.
- Wax says we can't use the garage anyway because the tenant parks in front of it. The garage isn't REALLY a two-car garage, but it does have double doors and the parking space in front of it is more than wide enough for two cars, but our tenant doesn't like... parking... I guess... and she always pulls her car in at right angles, taking up the center of the space, as indeed there's no reason not to since her car is the only one using the space. She COULD park to one side and the garage could be usable. But we'd have to talk to her and ask her to do that.
