C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 54

Jumpstarting a Prius…

A regular car can do it.

But Jane’s car was dead too, from the time we knocked the trickle charger off the ledge. It gets better.

Round one.

Triple-A comes out, hooks up, says Jane’s battery is iffy, but maybe just needs a charge. We get it going.

We drag out the Prius manual and find no, do not open the back battery pack, which is a monstrous lot of volts. Go to the hood, take the black plastic cover off the terminal which itself has a red plus cap on it, rectangular. OK.

We jump it, no problem. Guy thinks it’s charged.

Round two.

Jane has a doc’s checkup (routine) for the morning, so I go out to double check.

Both cars, dead as mackerels on a sunny beach.

I call AAA again, (that’s the American Automobile Association) and out comes the same guy who’d been called to a neighboring town and took most of an hour getting to us…

Well, we pull Jane’s battery, and funny thing, though it had been sold to about in 2012, the sticker on it says 2009. This is not amusing. We are going to have a conversation with AAA.

So that gets replaced. And we can’t complete the sale because Jane has to find her new license plates. Which she does.

Then we jump the Prius again, and it takes.

SO we end up…

some days…

We’ve had mice before in the detached garage. They made a heckuva mess, ate a mattress…

Our cats need exercise.

Well, so we need to clean up the mess out there and make it kitty-safe.

This turned up the fact the Prius’ battery is dead. Mmmm. Well. So we CAN’T leave the lights running. Manual says so. But now what?

Mmm. And there’s Jane’s car, which has been deader ‘n the proverbial mackerel since the trickle charger fell off the shelf last spring.

So we call AAA. Bless ‘em, we figured how to jump a Prius. That was a good thing. On newer models, there’s a cap on the 12-volt battery that rules ‘em all, and you take it off and follow the diagram in the manual.

Sucked it up, bigtime. Instant. We think it’s ok.

Then we attacked Jane’s car. Couldn’t find the key, finally did. Turns out the battery (bless you, Mike’s Towing, as honest guys who didn’t try to sell us a new one) is live. Just needs a charge. We got it going, got the thing running—and slammed the door on ‘lock’ with the key inside. Spoiled by the Prius, which beeps at you if you try to leave a key inside, and won’t lock the door.

We now know how to get into much more modern cars illicitly, but before we could quite complete the operation, Jane found the one other key, and we got in.

We believe we have both cars now running. Morning will tell.

This was one of those nights when it’s hard to remember it started a year ago with mice in a mattress.

We ordered pizza for supper.

I hate waiting for lab tests…

OTOH, clean bill of health. Happy dance.

Took a reading drive Monday…really excited…

We haven’t done this often enough. Jane and I took off for a 200 mile drive to Missoula MT and Ruby’s Inn, where we got a lovely room by the streamside, and had a nice breakfast pre-paid in the room charge, sausage, biscuits and gravy, corned beef hash, scrambled eggs—oatmeal and waffles had we wanted them; plus some little pastries. That’s, between the two of us, equal to a 20.00 breakfast, for sure, so knock that off the hotel bill. Very reasonable. And the walk on the streamside in the morning—gorgeous. The air was chill, so very still even the leaves of cottonwoods weren’t stirring, and birds had to work, not laze along on the winds….

When we drive we read one of our books ready for pub and discuss, which always means going back in to fix things, which I am doing…happy, happy, that it seems to work.

Progress is good.

We plan to do this more often.

Downright nippy this morning…and the knee is steadily improving…

Seems as if the antiinflammatory (simple Advil) was what it needed. Kudos to the doc, who alas, has now left the clinic for another place, wherever that is. But I’m starting to feel secure on stairs again, as in, normal. That’s a good thing.

I hate it when I lose time due to something like this. I had such a good start on this next book, and I was forced to go to a process I don’t regularly use and start a detailed outline, so I wouldn’t drop stitches…you can’t live on painkillers without getting apt to drop stitches.

I am glad to find, though I was a wee bit zooey, I wasn’t ‘off.’ The outline reads clean, and I’m going to go on by that process since I’ve started it, which is one reason (outside of the fact that, due to painkillers, I didn’t even think of it) there’s no new graph. The outline now masses a few thousand words…haven’t even counted. But it’s making sense.

Bliss…

…is finally getting some sleep. Now that I can take the anti-inflammatory, I have some hope this may get better.

I also found, amid the knee pain, that I’d run myself short of minerals—the body seems apt to do that, when it’s stressed. Meds can do that. You can’t take, eg, magnesium near the thyroid med, and you can’t take this and you can’t take that. And once certain minerals deplete, nerves are flat shot and nothing works right. So I took this magic potion we have for just such an eventuality—E-Lyte, a liquid of which you take a capful in water, and within the hour, frayed nerves began to be a lot, lot better. Jane nicely bought us a packet of vitamin-mineral stuff, and I have to get much more careful about taking it.

One thing that makes restaurants fun—being a pretty fair cook, and using spices, I can pretty well taste a dish and tell you what’s in it. And Knockaderry had a real good barbecue sauce, prepared by a gal who I think is actually Mexican…mmm. The way we like it. Spicy, pretty hot. I think the salient extras are a combo of cayenne, chipotle, and jalapeno, atop the usual barbecue ingredients of tomato, salt, and molasses. We liked it so well, we bought some and took it home, so I get to play chemist and try to figure what else is there. Yum.

Weather, from your almost-far-west weather, is scattered cloud and blue sky. But distinctly cooler. We’ve shifted the koi onto their coldweather diet of wheat germ kibble. And trees have begun to turn, not autumn red yet, but a few yellows.

Winter is coming.

Discussing chirality…and other big words.

Got into an interesting discussion on why life-molecules on Earth are of one chirality (handedness)—and lo! meteorites from elsewhere in the solar system that bring in such molecules are likewise -handed.

Heard anything on this?

Catch-22….as in…bitchy moment…

Catch-22

As in—I have to refrain from aspirin and blood thinners for the next 7 days because of a routine medical test…

As in—all painkillers but Tylenol are in this category.

As in—no amount of Tylenol works at all for me, except to give me an uncomfortable throat—I think I may be allergic to it.

As in—remember that knee I’m recovering from? Thank you, Paula, for the topical ointment…

I’ll be real glad when this is all done and the knee is better.

Meanwhile, I limped downstairs a couple of days ago to adjust some not-working equipment for the tank. This caused the autotopoff to pour fresh water into the system. We have some not-happy critters.

This means I have to trek up and down stairs adjusting the salinity back up where it belongs. Then we have to lift the heavy lid off so one of us can reach in and adjust the very unhappy several-hundred-year-old clam who pitched himself off his ledge and onto the sand where he could be in danger and get trapped….

Ow. Ow. Ow. I need to test the salinity and do the adjusting, and Jane will help me with the lid and the clam.

I want my knee to be all better. Now.

It’s way better than it was, but I have to watch it and walk only on the flat—we walked uphill to visit Joan, and that’s what caused this little setback.

Part of Earth’s Water is Older than the Sun

Amazing thought, but likely so, if you think about it…

Earth’s Water Older…

Sheijicon pix are up…

The Pictures