Car trouble. Not the big kind. The annoying kind. I drove my car last Friday. Then I left it in the driveway over the weekend, and the temperature dropped Monday night. Tuesday morning, I went out to start the car. Nothing. Not even engine sputters or clicking. Completely dead battery. John jumped the car, we checked for the culprit and found nothing (no lights were on, no doors were ajar, the radio was off) and I drove to work (about 20 minutes). That afternoon, around 2:15, I tried to start the car again. (I needed to get home so I could give Roxy her medicine around 2:30. More on that later.) Nothing. Completely dead battery. I got the woman who was parked next to me to help me jump the car again. I crawled all over the damn thing once it was running, looking for any doors not shut all the way or lights on that shouldn’t be – still nothing. I drove home, taking the long way. John did a ton of googling. Turns out this car often has battery drain problems. Something is draining power even when everything is off. The problem is that everyone’s solution is different. And we don’t have one yet. For now, we have a workaround (it helped that I was going to Baltimore today and didn’t need a car). Last night, after I got home, John unplugged this power connector thing that’s inside the dash on the far left (facing the driver’s side door). This morning, he plugged it back in and the car started right up. He drove it to work today, unplugged it again, and was able to start the car to get home. So something in the group of…things that the power connector controls is what’s draining the battery. The next step is to figure out which thing it is so we can fix it. Or replace it. Or…something. Now that I know I can start the car, it’s not an emergency. It’s just super annoying. And it turns out that this is why my power locks don’t work half the time. There’s not enough power left in the car to trip the locks, and I have to actual open the door with the KEY. How barbaric.
I have no segue for this next thing. I was going to go with “You know what else is barbaric?”, but it doesn’t make any sense. So I’m skipping the segue. Sue me. Also, I keep trying to spell segue “seque”. I’m not sure that’s a word in any language. What do I know? Maybe it is. Maybe it’s what a sequin becomes when it grows up.
My point is that I want to talk about Roxy now, but I can’t get there from power locks that don’t work.
I don’t even have a whole lot to say about Roxy, except that she’s doing okay. She had a seizure this morning, and she’s still having them every week to week and a half, but she’s recovered pretty quickly from her last few. The biggest headache has been the change in medication. We added a new one (the third) that we had to give her three times a day, 8 hours apart. That is HARD. No matter how we schedule it, we either end up having to give her a pill in the middle of the night or be home in the middle of the afternoon (2-ish – like yesterday), which is difficult when we have to be at work. And it’s so new (and so different from her regular medication schedule – twice a day, 12 hours apart) that even I’m working from home, I can’t remember to give her the pill on time, so we either end up giving it to her really late and skipping the next one or we skip the one I forgot and give her the late one. Thankfully, the drug company just started making an extended release version. We picked it up yesterday and started this morning. Twice a day, 12 hours apart. That we can do.
And here’s a video of my adorable puppy.
Roxy doesn’t want to play my games from Susannah Brewer on Vimeo.