Oh Taurus, Don't Fail Me Now

Just hang in there for one more month.

So. My car's a hoopty. Htd and I headed to the store tonight for our weekly grocery shopping trip. We bought all manner of foodstuffs - fresh fruits and vegetables, cereal, milk, eggs, lunch meats both animal and soy, ice cream, frozen items. We went through the checkout with our environmentally friendly reusable bags. We returned to my car and loaded all the groceries in the trunk. We dutifully returned the cart to the cart corral. We buckled up and prepared to leave the parking lot. I turned the key....and nothing. Not a whirr, not a groan, not a cough. Just...nothing. Oh cripes.

I think to myself, maybe it's the battery? But that doesn't make sense because the inside lights are still working intermittently and the door continues to make its uber-annoying dinging sound whenever it's open. I pop the hood (not really expecting to be able to DO anything) and do what I always do when I have car issues: call my dad. He gives me a couple things to try, all to no avail. Then one of those "universal truth" sort of things happened. It goes like this:

1 popped car hood
+ public place
------------------
random male offer(s) of "you need some help here?"

A very nice man in the parking lot came by and asked if I could use any help. I asked if he had any jumper cables - he did and proceeded to try to jump my car. (I had been telling the story by saying "and this nice guy came by and offered to jump me." I have since changed how I phrase that.) Jumping didn't work. The car gave a single feeble "rawr" and gave up. Cripes again.

So I called upon the single gal's best ally - guy friends. Dave ended up driving all the way up to where we were, bearing his tool collection and nifty little headlamp (because of course it was night time). He used his battery tester, which read a healthy 12 1/2 volts. Strange. Then he tried cleaning the battery terminals, but they were fairly clean to begin with so that didn't do anything. I reported back to my dad and he said there was probably a short in the battery, so try putting in a new one.

We all piled into Dave's mini cooper and drove to the closest Walmart (the only place open at 9:30 on a Sunday night) and I plunked down about 80 bucks for a new battery (they had ONE left) - which is sad because that is about 1/10th of what my car is worth these days. For real. Anyway, so we drove back to the grocery store, hooked up the new battery, I said a little prayer, turned the key and...VOILA! The car starts like it just rolled off the assembly line back in '95.

Thank goodness it was nothing more serious than a really old battery. Thank goodness we were in a fairly safe area of town when the car crapped out. Thank goodness for kind strangers with jumper cables. Thank goodness it happened on a weekend when awesome friends were available to help and I didn't have anyplace pressing I needed to be. It could have been so much worse, so praise God for the little things.

And speaking of looking on the bright side: when we got home over two hours later, the groceries were still cold. In spite of being a hoopty, my car has actual magical powers. You know, that...or the groceries were in the trunk...at night...in February.

I'm gonna go with magic.