What we have Learned Today

Whenever I have an experience like I did this morning, The Vegitales song pops in my head.

What we have learned, applies to our life today, God has a lot to say, in his book!

Not that what happened this morning has anything to do with the bible or vegitales or anything like that, but I did learn something. Well I learned several somethings, but let’s start at the beginning shall we.

This morning I got up as normal to go running. I had forgotten to charge my iPod over night and while I don’t need it to go running, I ran for nearly 20 years without it, I find that I like having it with me now. So I decided that I would plug it in for ten minutes to charge it enough for a 30 minute run. First, the cord in my bag would not work, so I went to the car and got the one that I knew would work. Please note that I went to the car, that will be important later.

It took a little longer than the ten minutes I had hoped for me to get the thing charged but in the end I left the house at just before 6 A.M. Now to interrupt here for a moment. I really do like running, but I am not a morning person. I don’t like getting up at 5:15 or 5:30 to go running, and it is a struggle everyday to do so, but it really is about the only time I can consistently get time to run. Also the first mile of every run is horrible. Unless you have done a proper warm up, (and at 5 in the morning who is doing that?) you get what I call the first mile jitters. For me this consists of a lot of “why am I doing this?” and “I should just go home and rest” and “ow this kind of hurts,” and “wow this run is going to suck,” and of course “Ok, I can do this.” I mention this because sitting on the couch waiting for the iPod the charge I just kept telling myself, you know you could just skip the run, make a pot of coffee and relax this morning. But I didn’t. In the end, I had a pretty good run. Not my best but since I was running late anyway, I decided it was best just to get the best run I could and just be happy with it.

So there I was, back home cooling down, making breakfast for the kids, reading with my daughter. I managed to get a shower without waking my wife, and only a couple of the kids had gotten up before 7 so I was happy. Then it was time to head to work. First, I have noticed that I have been getting more and more scatter brained lately, and it took me a couple of minutes to get my stuff collected. Then came the fun part.

Has anyone seen my keys?

After about ten minutes my eldest daughter found them. Still in the car, still in the ignition. While I was happy that she found them I was not happy with myself for having left them there. I grabbed the rest of my stuff and headed to the car. But something was wrong. The keys were still in the ignition, but there was no sound when the door was open. Dead Battery! BOO!

This is were it gets really interesting. Our tractor often needs to be jump started so we keep the jumper cables handy. However, the other day I was talking to the kids and said, “You know they really should be in one of the cars in case the battery dies while we are out.” Well, my son thought that was I great idea and since I have the older car, he put them in my trunk. He is a great kid, always thinking. Really! The problem is while I do have the older car it has some of those older car type problems. For example when I bought the car it came with none of the original keys including the one that would open the trunk. There is a button inside the car and one on the key fob so that is not really a problem most of the time. But these both rely on power to release the trunk latch.

Here is where we get to the what I have learned today. I learned that when batter is totally dead you can’t pop the trunk. When the jumper cables are in the trunk you can’t get to them to jump the car or even get enough power to open the trunk. I also learned, and I hesitate to even mention this because I know how dangerous it was (and yes I sent the kids inside while I did it) that you can use a spare piece of house wiring to hook up like a small set of jumper cables to give you enough power to pop the trunk so you can get the real cables and get the car started.

From one dead battery to another it was an interesting morning. I did eventually get the car started, and got to work only a little late. But, yeah the whole morning I have had that song going through my head.