This Day Could Have Gone Better

Although she no longer attends school there, my daughter, young Galadriel Tanqueray Onassis, returned to Richmond yesterday for Homecoming festivities with her old friends.



This morning I was greeted with a text message containing an address in Camden and instructions to come and get her when I got up.

I immediately ignored the message and went about my normal Saturday morning binnis. She's not the boss of me.

After a few cups of coffee and some routine google reading and porn surfing, I get showered throw on some grown-up clothes and head east.

I get to Camden, find the street and start looking for the house. Well, guess what? Apparently the rural chuckleheads in Camden don't cotton to no addresses. Not a single number on any of the houses. So I have to call GTO and have her walk outside while I slowly drive down the gravel road looking like a stalker.

We head back to Independence and I decide to stop at Little Richards Family Diner for some breakfast. I like taking GTO there because the food is good, it's cheap, and it annoys the shit out of GTO. That's just how I roll.

We finish breakfast, I pick up the check and toss 4 gold dollar coins down for the tip.



This gets GTO's attention. She's never seen those dollar coins before. She thinks it looks weird...dollars should be made out of paper. I told her I preferred the dollar coins because the remind me of pirate money.



She levels her most withering stink-eye at me and tells me how stupid I am. That always makes me smile with smug satisfaction.

We get in the jeep and it won't start. I turn the key and get nuttin'. I've experienced this before and it was due to excessive corrosion built up on the terminal posts. I pop the hood and sure enough, the fucker is covered in barnacles.

I poke at it, and scrape it. I go inside and get some coke to pour on it. I try starting it again but it's dead as a Kennedy. One of the locals come out and we discuss my predicament. Since I have the good sense to own a vehicle with a manual transmission (a jeep with an automatic transmission is an abomination and I'll have no part of it), we decide the best course of action is for him to give me a push so I can get it started by popping the clutch.

Moments later I'm heading for he nearest O'Reilly's My dashboard gauges are all hinky. All of a sudden my gas gauge is below empty and my voltage is nonexistent. We make it to O'Reilly's where their Space Age diagnostic equipment finds a dead fucking battery. $76.88 (that I really couldn't afford) later I'm in the parking lot with O'Reilly's tool box replacing my battery.

Now, I must say that through all of this GTO was a real trooper. She was a tremendous asset and actually helped quite a bit by slumping down in the passenger seat with her ear buds wedged in as deep as they would go and looking incredibly bored.

The cable on the positive terminal is as stubborn as a sober virgin on Prom Night. It just will not come loose. In fact, trying to lever it off with a screwdriver was coming close to pulling out the entire post.

I know what I need. I need a battery terminal puller. It's a lot like a corkscrew. It has these two little claw arms on each side with a threaded shaft (heh heh) in the middle. You slip the claw arms under each side of the cable clamp, center the threaded shaft on top of the battery post and start screwing. Pops that little fucker right off of there.



I know that this is the tool I need because I have one. At home. In the garage. In my tool box that I used to keep in my jeep but don't anymore.

Fuck me running! Back into O'Reilly's to drop another 6 bucks.

The battery gets changed but the bracket that secures the battery won't fit because this battery is a different size than the other one. AWESOME! I'll be breaking out the Whiskey Tango bungee cords later.

Just for shits and giggles, I have them come back out and run a Level 1 Diagnostic on my warp core, er, um, I mean alternator.

Sure as shit, it's going tits up on me. So the $80.00 I just spent won't do me a lot of good unless I also pull another $132.00 out of my ass for a new alternator plus another $50.00 to have a mechanic give me a wink and tell me I got purdy lips.

But not this day, Men of the West! This day we say fuck it. This day tuck our tail between our legs and break out teh bourbon.

Tomorrow we remember to park pointing downhill, don't use the headlights and keep the tool kit and jumper cables in the jeep where they belong.