An Eventful Day

Mark's car started having some problems at the end of last week. Mark drives a white 1998 Honda Passport. He took it into the Honda dealer right next to us for them to just clean off the battery, because Mark had heard that sometimes it's just a problem with the cleanliness of the battery. The guy took out a regular pocket knife and scrapped off all this gunk. He said it was the grossest battery. He also recommended changing the battery. Being the non-trusting and cheap people that we are, we didn't get the battery changed. We figured that we could drive it for awhile longer and then when it died we would get it taken care of. Turns out that may have been a bad choice...

We were gone for the weekend (having Halloween with Brett, Becky, and kids... to be blogged about at a later date), leaving the car parked in our parking lot. It hadn't started at all that day before we left. Turns out it hasn't even vaguely started since we got back. We were hoping it would at least start so we could get it over to a mechanic. No such luck. On Monday we both had school/work. Thankfully, those two destinations are only about 10 minutes away from one another, so we have been able to carpool pretty easily when Mark had school. On Tuesday we wanted to take the car in, but weren't able to get it taken care of before I had to go to work. I ended up having a ridiculously long two-hour lunch scheduled, so I was able to come home and try to jump-start the car. Neither of us had ever jump-started a car before. Thankfully I had purchased cables sometime in the last year or two. We tried time after time to jump the car, but to no avail. With meetings to attend, I had to rush back to work. Mark used our emergency roadside assistance from our insurance company to get someone to come out and jump the car for free. Turns out the car is completely dead... the professional wasn't able to jump the car either. So maybe we're not so bad at jumping a car. :)

This morning we set our alarms for extra early to finally do something about the car. We had decided that we could push the car to the Honda dealership that is literally across the street from us. We had such faith in ourselves... such blind and misplaced faith. :) We were able to back the car out from the parking spot due to a very slight decline. After we got it out of the spot, we started pushing. And nothing happened. We couldn't move that car to save our lives. In our defense, that thing is rather large and in charge. We quickly realized that even if we were able to get in the groove and get some momentum going, there was no way we were going to be able to get the car past the little hills out of our parking lot. Yes, that's right, we were trapped in the parking lot because of a little hill. Truly sad. Disheartened, we realized that we would have to put the car back in the parking spot and get a tow truck to take the car across the street (which should also be free with our emergency roadside assistance... cross your fingers). Mark braced himself at the back of the car and I got set to steer us back into the spot. And now we literally were moving backwards instead of just standing still. The slight incline had turned into a daunting task. Everytime we would start pushing, we would maybe move forward just a few inches, but gravity would eventually catch up with us and the car would start rolling backwards before I could grab the emergency brake. Eventually we switched places, because Mark was better at pushing, steering, and emergency braking without sitting down. Even without my sitting down in the car while we were pushing, it was difficult. I literally thought a few times that our car was simply going to have to remain blocking the entire parking lot. It was ridiculously funny at 7:30 am and so stinkin' hard to push that thing up the small incline. It literally took us 15-20 minutes just to get the car back into its spot. Mark's shoulder still hurts from pushing the car this morning. What a stud. So, we're still hoping that we can figure out the car thing soon....

The rest of the day was pretty uneventful. This evening though, we had a bit of a mishap... We were eating the last of our chocolate covered peanuts (the best ever!! love the Winco grocery store by Brett&Becky) and two of the peanuts were stuck together. Mark was trying to be cute and romantic and put one of the peanuts in his mouth so I could eat the other one... i.e. the cute spaghetti kiss from Lady and the Tramp. Turns out this wasn't so cute. In my excitement for the chocolate, I apparently missed and got some of Mark's lip. Yes, that's right... I wanted my chocolate so badly that I apparently bit his lip and bit it hard. He has a blood blister of sorts now. You can't see it super well in this picture, but it's the red thing on the bottom right of his lip. I felt so bad, but we laughed pretty hard about that.