An Electric Monday

We decided that with Christmas rapidly approaching and Valerie having given up hope that our lights would ever find their way from the garage to our roof, that it would be fun to take the kids out in the van to drive around and look at some of the neat Christmas light displays that some of the more ambitious dads had put up around town.

Valerie had written down a list of addresses of some of the neat local displays from the newspaper that we would go look at and then there is a neighborhood not too far from home where everyone does a great display that is also a lot of fun to drive through.

It was cold again yesterday evening with temperatures in the low 20’s and a steady wind making it feel a lot colder so after dinner, while the kids were getting coats and shoes found, I decided to go out and get the van running. I turned the key and… nothing. No lights, no radio, no clock, the van was completely and totally dead. Great.

I wandered back into the house to let the family know that they could take it easy for a while while I dug (literally, but that is a story for another day) the jumper cables out of the garage to get the van going.

It was a small miracle that I remembered where the cables were and was quickly able to locate them. Within a few minutes, my Audi was donating juice to the van and it looked like we were going to be on our way. Unfortunately though, after 20 minutes of charging the van was still not budging. There was no sign of life at all.

I noticed that the van’s battery still had Korean writing on it which meant it was the one that came with the van still. That was 88 months and 90,000 miles ago so it seemed that it might be time to just replace the battery.

Off to the auto parts store Val and I went while the kids still were waiting in the living room with their coats on to go see the lights. We quickly bought the battery and I grabbed a small set of wrenches to make sure I would have everything I would need to get it changed and $111 later we were on our way back home again.

The old battery came out quickly and the new one was on its way back in when my hands, numb from the cold lost grip on the wrench I was using and it slipped down into the nether-regions of the engine compartment barely in sight and totally out of reach of my hands.

I was thrilled to be battling Murphy’s Law outside on the very coldest night of the year and by now the kids had given up hope on dad, had taken off their coats again a and had gone back to watching SpongeBob on TV.

I tried in vain for several minutes to reach my lost tool but eventually this quest led to another frustrated trip back to the auto parts store for a little extendable magnet-on-a-stick thingy to reach down there and grab it. Thankfully, once that had been accomplished things went quickly and we were almost on the way.

Valerie decided to memorialize the glorious moment with yet another flattering surprise picture of me finishing things up…






With the new battery the van fired right up and within a few minutes we were on our way.

We did have fun looking at some great light displays and Benjamin mad liberal use of his newest vocabulary word calling each and every thing he saw “awesome”. He was right, many of the displays were pretty awesome.