Today Was More Expensive Than I Expected

If you would like to hear me narrate this post, click below:

As I often do on Saturday mornings, I got up and headed out to cruise the garage sales. The overall sale count was a little low and very few of those sounded interesting to me. There were, however, two neighborhood garage sales.

Don't be impressed. Neighborhood one was two streets wide and three deep. Sum total of about 5 garage sales. Neighborhood two was actually just three different streets in the same area with one sale per street. It did concentrate the sales into a relatively small area so that was good.

I picked up some music CDs, a case for my flash drives, and some other nick-knacks and decided to run through the drive through and pick up breakfast (as I will also often do on a Saturday morning). On my way there, I saw a sign and took a detour to one last sale. Not too impressive so I got back in the car and heard the slow, churning strains of a rapidly dying battery.

This was not a complete surprise. I haven't had any problems during the week that I noticed but keep in mind, I generally drive sixty miles before shutting off the car. Even a battery on its last leg would probably get enough juice to start the car at least once after a one-hour session with the alternator. Oh, I guess that was what was happening.

What I had noticed, though, was that she was cranking slow on the weekends as I was driving for a few minutes between garage sales. I kept saying to myself, "I gotta get that checked" but as with everything lately I've been robotically going through the motions so much that it is difficult to avert my attention for even the most routine of tasks (such as getting my hair cut which is something else I finally did this morning).

Anyway, the wife had to get dressed and leave the house a little earlier than expected. I drove home, got the battery out and took it to the parts store where they confirmed that it was, in fact, bad. I tacked a small tub of hand cleaner and a new air filter onto the ticket and plunked down $88.48 to get the car running again. That was about what I was expecting to have to pay, yesterday was payday, and I'm not so automotively inept that I can't change my own battery so it worked out okay.

No great bargains. No massive sales. Just an average Saturday morning with a battery swap thrown in.

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Next week is a city-wide garage sale in Cushing (about 30 minutes SE of here)

For those of you from Oklahoma, don't ask me why I was channeling Galin Culver when I read this. I don't know. (Was this a great post, or what?)