Vehicle Batteries & Oven Drawers

Sergeant Emerald (aka. our green Nissan Xterra, a wannabe war machine but definitely failed the 'guts' test) was feeling a little under the weather last week, lacking the energy that usually gets us from point A to point B.

It all started out when I had a craving (no, I am not pregnant) for lemon loaf (thanks to Suzanne who had baked up a yummy lemon cake only a few nights before and got me onto a lemon kick). So, rather than using self-control and moving on with life I began baking a lemon loaf...at 8:30 at night...only to discover part way through that I was out of baking powder. Now, we do have a grocery store about 3 minutes up the road but for the most part I avoid shopping there...because it's a little sketchy. I especially avoid shopping there after dark...because the grocery store suits the area well...sketchy. But the eggs were cracked and there was no going back. So, after telling Mike to come looking for me if I didn't return in 15 minutes I ventured out...in the dark...into the sketchy-ness...with Sergeant Emerald. I found a parking spot in a well lit area in front of a dollar store just down from the grocery store, ran in to grab the missing baking powder, and back to the vehicle (after paying, of course) as quick as I could.

Now, you may perhaps think that this little country-stuck-in-the-big-city girl is exaggerating or being slightly melodramatic about the quality of our neighborhood, and if that is your thought you must be informed of two things: 1) country girls are sensible; it's the city girls who add the drama to the world. 2) I'm not exaggerating...come visit!

I reveled in a moment of relief after climbing back into the vehicle...I had survived. But the next few minutes took this little adventure to a whole new level. Upon putting the key into the ignition all I heard was that infamous little clicking noise...and nothing else. Yup, our mean, green, war machine failed me.

Okay, so this is all getting a little wordy (I have trouble with keeping it short and sweet sometimes) so I'm going to quickly sum up the rest of this incident because I have more to say later on. So, I called Mike. Then I got out of the vehicle and my keys stayed in and because it's a sketchy area I locked the door (manually) on my way out. I felt very dumb. I called Mike again and told him to find our other set of keys. I tried to make it look like I had it all together so no sketchy person would ask if I needed help. I hid out in a dollar store and tried not to look like I was just passing time. Mike showed up with a friend, boosted our vehicle, and we drove back home. Then I made the rest of the lemon loaf and ate it too (well, not quite all of it).

The next day came and I decided to give Sergeant Emerald a second chance (well, actually, this would be his third chance because we had to boost him once right after we got back from Christmas break). He worked once, then twice, and then left me stranded at another grocery store. So again I called Mike and again he bothered one of our friends to come rescue me. By this time Mike was getting tired of being a student as well as a knight in shining armour and I was getting tired of being stranded so we took a vote and decided to do something about the Sergeant. Being that we are very educated and experienced in the area of vehicles and mechanics (that's sarcasm, if you didn't catch it) we self-diagnosed his battery as being the problem and drove straightway to the battery store (aka. Costco), picked up our solution to the problem, and brought both it and Sergeant Emerald home again.

Because it was thundering, lightninging (apparently that is not a word but why does lightning not have an equivalent verb form to thunder...don't those two generally come together?), and pouring rain, we decided to hold out on installing the new battery. Well, none of it ended up letting up and I needed the vehicle in the morning to get to my shift at the pregnancy center so, in the dark and storm, we headed out to change the battery. Now, everything went relatively smooth...until the last few seconds of the job, that is. Mike is a perfectionist; that can be both good and bad. This time it was bad. The rusty bolt that is supposed to keep it all in there was just not as tight as he thought it should be and in an attempted to right that wrong the whole thing went wrong. The bolt broke. That put a damper on things...as if we weren't damp enough already from being out in the rain.

After staring at our dilemma for several minutes I came up with the brilliant idea that we should glue it back together. Mike didn't think the idea was near as brilliant as I did. I was talking super-sticky glue, of course. He looked at me like I was from another planet. (It was much too late at this point to go hunt someone down to drive us somewhere to get something to replace the bolt...and Mike had class the next morning at 7am...so we were rather limited on our options of what to do next). His brilliant idea sounded much more complicated to me: find something in our apartment with a bolt, take it out, and use it to patch up Sergeant Emerald. My thought was, oh great, tonight we are going to be sleeping on a three-legged bed. Well, it ended up that the bolts in the legs of our bed frame wouldn't fit...so we moved on to the rest of the furniture. Finally, after about 20 minutes of looking, we came to the appliances and wouldn't you know it, we found a prospect. We unscrewed it, tried to put the oven drawer back in place as best we could (I just have to be a little careful when opening it now), and tried it out on the Sergeant. Who would have thought that vehicle batteries and oven drawers had so much in common!?!? But, hey, it worked like a charm.

Moral of the story: Cravings, when indulged, may lead to problems you were neither looking nor asking for...but you might luck out and end up with a good story at the end of it all.