VROOOOM....putt putter....click hiss...cough arrrggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg

Just when I thought my problems had ceased, it being Thanksgiving Holiday and all, I get a nasty wake up. My lovely Super Saturn is at it again. She loves a good practical joke, but this one is going to cost me. Last year about the middle of winter, she started playing the ‘lets turn off all the gages and then turn them back on while Tricia is driving’ game.** Not so amusing, but as she only did it occasionally I learned to live with it. At the beginning of this winter she decided to begin the game again, but like a two year old with a new toy (or the box from said toy) she will not give it up. It’s exasperating I tell you! Yesterday she played the game 10 times in the time it took me to get from my house to the highway (roughly 5 minutes) and then a few times on the highway just for good measure. During one of the highway times, she actually shut off the radio along with the gages. It only shut off for a moment, coming back on with the rest of the stuff, and the time was short enough that I didn’t lose my programming. Still, we are getting progressively more extensive in the game.

**Explanation of game: Super Saturn takes the gas gage, the odometer, speedometer, and tachometer and turns them off, they all go to zero as though the car was not on (we are usually driving while she does this, but she will do it in the parking lot while warming up just to practice). Then the brake like comes on and a second or so later (after they have slowly floated from wherever they are to zero) they will go back to normal. The car clicks and all is normal until the next instance of the game. Occasionally if she is feeling really fiesty, she will turn off the cruise control when you turn on your blinker. She's only tried that version of the game twice though, and we hope it doesn't catch on. It would be damned pesky trying to change lanes if you constantly had to adjust the cruise...

I called Saturn today to find out just what the game might be called. After all, I have to drive to Green Bay tomorrow for the Holiday and don’t want the game to progress to “sitting on the side of the road waiting for the tow truck”. The nice mechanic told me it’s probably not a fuse or short (like I thought) but rather loose or corroded battery wires. Hmm, now this I can probably deal with, yes? I didn’t get a chance tonight to go look at the cables, and it’s dark now. I will take the car into the Saturn Mechanic in GB to have them fix it permanently, but tomorrow before I leave on my journey I will check the oil and the cables. I just hope if they are lose they don’t require a metric socket to fix. I have English ones, but the Super Saturn is eclectic and cannot decide if she prefers the English or metric system of measure. Consequently, as I recall there are both types of bolts under her hood.

Oh, and before you yell at me for looking under her hood, I had her permission, and she had her Serpentine Belt on!