Current mood:

lucky/grateful

Auto Parts Store Rocks Austin Woman's World
Last night I had the experience of my battery going dead. No warning, no slow or sluggish starts to warn - just dead. Immediately after discovering this, I thought about what would happen if I were to be paged (was/am on call this w/e, Fri through Mon), and lo, I was paged to come in for a STAT echo. Luckily I was at R's house, and before I even conceived of it as a solution (I was dialing AAA), she offered up her car so I could go back to the hospital, which I did. After returning from doing my study, around 20:20, R and I jump-started my car. I talked to my dad during this whole ordeal, and he was most helpful, as always. We had pretty much decided that it was just the battery (my car's a 2001 (Civic, BTW) and this was the original battery) and not some deeper problem such as the alternator (one clue was that the alt. warning light was not illuminated). With R in tow just in case, I made my way to Advanced Auto Parts. After only five minutes, I had selected and purchased a new battery, and an AAP employee was outside removing the old and installing the new. Awesome!  [They even have a banner in the window advertising - truthfully - free and fast battery installation.] I felt lucky to have a dad such as mine, a good friend nearby; and to live in a society which supports such extravagant things as auto parts store which double as mechanics in a pinch and are open until 10pm.  Pretty wild, actually.

After restarting my car, the radio displayed the word 'CODE.' This is the result of an anti-theft mechanism; nice thought, but not really applicable here. I searched through the owner's manual and such, and found no code anywhere. I searched online but quickly decided to just ring up the local Honda dealership. They were most helpful, walking me through steps to get some code off the radio, which they then put into some database to find out the unlocking code for my radio. I entered this code, and now I have a working radio again.