Power when you need it

Recently Carolyn said to me as she was leaving for work, "Arnold, could you keep an eye out for the keys to the red rocket?" (Red Rocket is her name for the Honda Civic that Steven deeded back to us when they bought Richard's old pickup truck. I had such a busy day that I barely thought about the missing keys, let alone actually look for them or find them.

When Carolyn got home, I asked if she had looked in the car itself although I could think of no reason to drop keys in there. Going out to the Civic with a flashlight and my keys, we quickly discovered that she had indeed left the keys in the Civic... in the ignition switch ... with the switch turned to Accessories. She managed to drain the battery completely.

Fortunately, I thought, we have these battery power packs so we don't need to use jumper cables. I pressed the power check on each of these backup batteries and got no reading on the most recently purchased power pack and barely a flicker on the other, older one.

Fortunately, Carolyn could make do with the white van instead of the red rocket so we could plug in the power packs. After charging overnight, they were up to starting the Honda's engine which could then charge up the original battery.

I guess the moral to this story is that even backup batteries aren't very helpful if you don't keep them charged. Or maybe the moral is, keep more than one backup battery even if one of them is inside another car.