Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Other ideas were bouncing around my brain (image of little Lego idea-figures playing on a grey moon-bounce thingie) earlier, but between having had a few of them get away from me and wanting to go to bed soon (blankets warm, poking fingers at keys cold), I'll just toss in a "how my day went" for now.

Thanks to the advice I got right here on LJ in the wee hours, I was able to solve the spurting water problem in my heating system -- far simpler than I'd feared. When I got up I wasn't feeling quite up to dealing with the car yet, so I finished draining the expansion tank near the furnace first, poking at LJ in between bucketfuls ("bucketsful"?). Then I finally convinced myself to brave the chill and deal with the car.

I feel like I should be much more used to the temperatures by now. I think I usually acclimate more quickly than this, but I was feeling the cold through most of December, and now that we're done with our bizarre first-week-of-January warm spell, I'm seriously feeling the cold again. But I'm feeling it when it's not all the way down to what I'm used to calling "bitter". So changing a warm fuzzy sleeper for not-yet-warmed-up street clothes, then going out to face a lot of outdoor time, took some easing into. Anywho, I finally went out to try to start the Honda (the car from my uncle's estate). It turned over once, ground and groaned once, then died. Before I put the key in the ignition, the battery (which had been charged by driving around last night) was about 12.6 V. One failed attempt at starting, and it was at 12.06 and dying quickly. So I pulled the Toyota (the no-longer-highway-worthy wreck) over and used the borrowed jumper cables to start it, and drove off to the garage for inspection. (Uh, yes, I did re-park the Toyota and turn it off before driving away in the Honda.)

At the garage, after being greeted with "I'm not sure I can get to it today," (that's okay -- pulling in without an appointment I didn't expect it today), I was told that my first guess -- that the Big Electrical Problem in the Honda is the battery -- was correct (especially after I told them the charging circuit was putting out between 13 and 14 V, as expected). A more specialized meter than my little VOM revealed 175 "cold cranking amps", and they said the number should be at least 300 A. Fine, what's a battery cost? $91 installed. I winced. They said, "But you'd really be better off buying it elsewhere and putting it in yourself." (Okay, so it wasn't my imagination; $91 is a lot for a battery.) I also found out the garage doesn't take checks, so I had to make sure I had cash, or money in the account that has an ATM/check card before I could pick the car up. So I headed towards home.

There was a bus stop closer to the garage than I'd remembered, but it was too cold and windy to stand around at a bus stop. And although the distance home was certainly far enough to warrant a ride, the distance to the grocery store I had planned to stop at was in that marginal range where it really wouldn't be silly, especially for someone with my problems, but it was close enough to feel silly spending half an hour waiting to spend five minutes riding. So I walked. Likewise for the trip home from the grocery. All in all, I guess it took me about twice as long to walk as it would have taken to wait for and ride two busses. (I definitely got passed by one bus, I don't remember whether I was passed by a second one.) And walking I had more to see -- I hadn't walked the farther part of that trip before.

Now I had an additional plan in mind. A camera I was recently given has yet to have the LEDs in the viewfinder behave as described in the manual, so my plan was to shoot a test roll in that camera on my walk, drop it at the drug store next to the grocery (I don't normally use one-hour developing, but hey, for a "just see if the exposures are right" roll ...) and pick it up the next day (expecting it not to be done yet by the time I finished with the grocery store). One roll has already been through that body, but that roll has possible complications from an iffy lens for a bunch of the shots, and the rest used flash, so I wanted a more controlled test of the auto-exposure system. I found a bunch of boring things to point the camera at just to expose film, and a few interesting things that I'll want to go back and shoot again later ... and when I got to the drug store I found that the film had never advanced. (This is a camera with a motor-drive.) Fiddling with the film cannister, it seems I actually had -- are you ready for this? -- a bad roll of film! I could not get more film than enough to load to come out of the cannister! *grumble* That's never happened to me before. Misloaded film, yes. Film that just couldn't be used, no. So I'll have to test that body tomorrow.

On the way to the grocery store, some kids across the street yelled to get my attention (looked like maybe a 7th-grader and her big sister), and started asking me questions about the way I was dressed. (And the expected orientation question, but they phrased it as, "Do you have a girlfriend?") They wanted to take a picture of me, but their camera wasn't working.

I bought a few groceries. I didn't bring a backpack and my arms have been hurting, so anything heavy (like a 3 l bottle of soda and a sack of potatoes) got postponed until I pick up the car, but bread and butter and cheese don't weigh much ... Then I walked home, a shorter trip than the walk from the garge, and one I've done before, but it's far enough that I have to be feeling decently well to do it (about eight blocks, I think -- not far for a healthy person, and not unreasonable on one of my good days). All told, I think I walked about half (maybe a third) of the distance from Catonsville to Union Square. Uh, a couple miles, give or take a bit?

Got home and discovered the garage had called me a few minutes earlier (the ringer was drowned out by traffic noise, I guess) to tell me my car was ready and had passed inspection. (Say what? I didn't think any car ever passed a Maryland inspection on the first try. I'd even considered removing a light bulb as a "Murphy spell" to give it something trivial to fail on. Well, it passed. Nifty.) Unfortunately there wasn't enough time left before the garage closed for me to sort out money and get back there, so I get to deal with dressing for the cold weather a second day. (Then again, I'd expected that because I didn't think they'd get to even look at the car so quickly, and this time I can take the bus out there 'cause I won't have a "make the distance seem silly to ride for" stop along the way. Hmm. "Worth taking a bus" is a much longer distance for me than "worth driving myself". I should really examine the reasons for that. And/or get a bicycle.)

So I checked my mail, peeked at LJ, rested, stroked Perrine, and convinced myself to go back out in the cold (in the Toyota this time) to buy a battery ($45, plus a $5 "core" fee that I think I get back when I bring in the old battery, to make sure it gets recycled) and make sure I'd be able to pay the inspection fee. Came home, curled under a blanket in the blue bedroom so I could watch CSI and ER at the same time as I read my friends page on LJ, and figured I should call it a night. I turned on the furnace so I'd be able to type this comfortable in a chair instead of huddled on the bed, made some (decaf) coffee, washed the few dishes in the sink, and wrote this (turned the furnace off early in the typing -- the house is cooling but won't be too cold for me to change for bed by the time I sign off). I need to find the battery-cable-size wrench, but I plan to come back to the house in between picking up the car and driving to the Motor Vehicle Administration anyhow (I'm not lugging a car battery out to the bus stop without a good reason), so if I don't find it before I crash, no biggie. As long as I don't wake up tomorrow non-functional from having pushed my body too hard today. [knocks wood]

Fortunately it looks like getting the car all legal and stuff will cost less than the money my mother handed me for that purpose. *whew*

Thinking about my day, I started wondering what's considered a "lot of walking" or "too far to be a reasonable walk" for healthy people. On the one hand, they're not dealing with chronic pain issues and worrying about same kinds of repercussions from overexercise. On the other hand, at least in the parts of the US that I feel I know, most folks are unaccustomed to walking real distances (true of myself before and after I got sick), and many are also out of shape. I know that there are a lot of people for whom two miles (a bit over three kilomters) wouldn't be "far" on foot assuming they weren't in a big hurry, but I've got no sense of whether that attitude is usual or unusual in my own culture. It doesn't sound all that far, considering that I had to run eight tenths of a mile before soccer practice every day when I was in twelfth grade (well, until the season ended, of course), and this is walking. But it looks like such a long distance staring down Frederick Rd. and noting how many times the looks of the surrounding neighbourhoods change, and living in an automotive culture. I do know my legs and feet thought it was a long way, but with the fibromyalgia, my own body isn't a good measure for that.