Batteries

Front half of the Thursday group regrouping after the turnaround at Ormond

The note on the kitchen counter read, "The car wouldn't start this morning - "Low Battery."  Wonderful. I'd just gotten home from my morning ride. We were still under a "Heat Advisory" because of the combination of summer temperature and particularly high humidity. Not that I'd been planning on taking the car to work anyway, but I knew there would be some logistics involved in replacing the battery. Later, at work, where one of my co-workers had called in to say she would be late because her car battery was dead, I checked the inventory at the nearby O'Reilly Auto Parts store and saw that they did indeed have something that would work for the low, low price of $159, plus tax, plus core. There were some cheaper alternatives, of course, but this one was closer and my only readily available source of transportation that could carry a battery was Danielle's scooter that hadn't been on the road in a couple of months, at least. As soon as I got home went out with my 10mm socket and got to work pulling the battery, which is a simple task except that the moment I disconnected it the alarm, which apparently has its own power source, went off. With no power to the rest of the car, the remote had no effect. The only way to turn it off was to manually lock the door and close it. Naturally, that meant that opening it again was going to involve prying off a plastic cover on the driver's side door and using the metal emergency key that I was hoping was in The Wife's key fob because mine is a replacement that doesn't have that.

and the back half of the group

So then I'm ready to take the old battery to the store, only to discover that the scooter battery is too run down to start the engine and little bitty kick-start wouldn't do it either. So I put the charger on the scooter battery and had to wait an hour or so for it to charge before heading off to O'Reilly's. I put the new batter in, then had to reset a whole bunch of things so that the keyless entry would work and the clock knew what time it was, etc., etc. In the process, the car displayed a message that The Wife's key had a low battery.  So back to the internet to find someplace with the relatively uncommon battery, a trip to Walgreens where I paid approximately ten times the actual cost for two little batteries. That evening I burned the hell out of my arm on the barbeque grill when I reached down to adjust the air intake. Went to bed early.

Corsairs!

So Thursday's levee ride had, for some unknown reason, a pretty big turnout. I guess there were twenty or so at one time or another, so that kept the pace fairly brisk. Woody was on his TT bike, but he was just shadowing the back of the paceline trying to get comfortable on the bike. The LAMBRA Team Time Trial Championship is a week from Saturday and so there have been a few more TT bikes showing up than normal lately. I was feeling OK, but for some reason, possibly the prior day's WeMoRi, my legs were loading up really quickly every time I hit the front, so I was taking short pulls to try and limit the damage. This morning I took it nice and easy on the levee, stopping at Zotz on the way back for an iced coffee. This weekend may turn out to be another double Giro Ride weekend for me. After a couple of weeks with practically no rain, it looks like we'll be back to a more typical weather pattern by Sunday when the wind finally shifts back around to the south, more or less. Meanwhile, I've been enjoying Erin's photos from the Oshkosh fly-in.