Christmas?
Where to start...... um ok... To get to this story, I have to tell another story.
Last friday, I went back to my mom's house for my grandparent's 59th anniversary. I dropped by my uncle's house to pick him up, but my aunt drove her own car, since she wanted to leave a bit early. About 10 minutes out from my mother's place, I notice my battery light on the dash comes on. There's not much I can do about this because I'm stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic. I start getting over toward the right hand lane, and make it off to the shoulder, just to have the car totally die. Great, alternator isn't charging the battery. Since my aunt is right behind me, there really isn't a way to jump start from her car.... unless..... yes, removing the battery from her car to do it! So we get it started and start off once again..... only to have it die two minutes later. Luckily, my uncle was with me and he has AAA. We have the car towed to my mom's house and continue to the resturaunt for the anniversary dinner. After dinner, we swing by the auto parts store to get a new alternator..... $145. The install was easy, being it's a subaru, the alternator is right on top -- two bolts and it's done. It runs well enough to drive back home, where I put the battery on a charger, to be safe.
.....Until Tuesday. Same problem on the way home from work. I'm able to coast in to the driveway, just to have it die. At least it's home, right? I ask one of my housemates to bring me to get a new battery. All is good and fine.... or so I thought.
So.... Christmas Eve.... I drove out to my mom's place again and had the family christmas with'm. It was a pretty good time, had a few drinks and found out I'm not half bad at rock band's guitar. About 1am, I head out. I decided to take a back way home that goes out though the middle of nowhere, but it cuts off like 30 mins, sticking to the freeways. So.... roughly 4 miles out from the next town..... the battery light slowly starts to fade on. Great. At this point, I floor it and high-tail it toward town. Luckily, I made it to a 7-11 parking lot, where, again, the car cuts off. If things weren't bad enough, the skies decide this would be a fantastic time to open up and downpour. Fan-fucking-tastic. Going though and checking all my fuses, relays and battery connections, I remove all added load -- unplugged the amp lead and the fog lights. I waited about 15 mins with the car off to see if it would regain enough juice to start back up.... luckily it was. I high-idle it in park to around 2500 RPMs with everything off to see if the alternator would do it's job and recharge the battery. After about 10 minutes at this pace, I started turning things back on.... suprisingly, it seemed to have work. After waiting another 5 minutes, I decided to give it another shot with driving. It worked. The drive home was crazy wet though.... there were times it was raining to hard, I could barely see the road (you forget how much light those extra fog lights give until they're off). I made it home roughly around 3:45am.
Christmas day. Cold as ever in this house. I had enough of this place being freezing all the time. For those who don't know, one of my housemate's windows is sorta.... half there. He tried to fix it by putting plastic around the entire inside, but it didn't really work that well. So I investigated. One of the windows was wide open that could still be closed.... right. The second was legatimately broken. Half of the glass was missing. So..... I closed the open, functional window, and got to work finding a way to fix it better. I taped up a plastic sheet on the outside of the window over the broken pane. It seems to have worked also; the house isn't as chilly anymore. I guess I'm off to be social now since one of the housemates is eager to go out there.
Merry Christmas none the less, and thanks for actually reading this entire novel, it'll be available in paperback in your local stores soon!