The Happy Honda Lives Again!

Well, the other day I went out to the Happy Honda to make a quick trip to the Thai place just down the street to pick up our dinner. Now, I have to be honest… nearly every time I’ve started the Happy Honda since we got her, I’ve given her a ‘good game’ pat on the dashboard when she starts up. I did that because I knew it would just be a matter of time before she gave out… she is, after all, 21 years old.

Sure enough, I tried to start her up, and she wouldn’t even try to turn over. “Oh, no,” I thought, “it’s over.” But after a quick look around I surmised that my problem was most likely just a dead battery. The back left door had been left slightly ajar and the dome light was on. Usually that’s not quite enough to kill a battery, but we don’t drive our car every day, or even every other day, so who knows how long it was on.

As a rule, I usually say that things like this always happen at the worst possible moment. But, perhaps as a testament to my never-failing positivity, the first thing I thought after I got out of the car was, “Well, all in all, this is probably the best time for this to happen.” After all, I wasn’t going on an urgent errand, I was just headed to get Thai food; I wasn’t headed far, the place was easily within biking distance; it wasn’t raining or freezing cold, it was a lovely Cambridge summer evening, and the bike ride down Sidgwick Avenue was quiet, peaceful, and pretty.

The next day I set out to fix the car. Step 1: find another car to jump mine; step 2: find jumper cables. As luck would have it, some friends of ours (Sarah and Joel) are out of town and we happened to have their car keys, so step 1 was covered. Step 2 was a little more complicated, as we don’t know very many people who have cars, and none of them have jumper cables. After a couple of days searching, I stumbled upon some today, and was able to get the job done with minimal hassle. In fact, Candice and I made a lunch date out of it… since the car needed to be driven for a while to charge the battery, we drove to a shopping center and left the car on while I ran into Subway for sandwiches. Asher was in the back just chilling in his car seat.

I’ll give it to you straight, folks… when it comes to blog posts, I tend to have a flair for the dramatic… and a dead car battery has such potential for being a dramatic blog post… but in this case, bringing the Happy Honda back to life was… well… almost enjoyable.

I’ll leave you with my favorite picture from today… sleeping on daddy’s chest: