Jane’s too stiff to move, neck and shoulder and lower back all out; plus aloe on the road-rash every hour—she is scared to death the lip is going to scar permanently. I gained 6 whole pounds during the con that are going to have to come off the hard way…sigh. We are collectively a mess.

But we’re back at work. We’ve got so much cleanup to do in the house—and yesterday Jane was just done in. I think we’re going to be off the rink for a bit more—for one thing, Jane doesn’t want to go out in public because it means putting makeup on the road-rash that just makes it harder to heal.

And when I tried to make a grocery run, our car battery died again. Flat. Dead. We put it on trickle-charge and it wouldn’t resurrect. So I called AAA, and got the senior battery tech at a rescue company that does batteries for AAA. From him, I got a wealth of info, which I will pass along cheap.

Our battery, installed just last Wednesday, had totally drained. Again.

The train of events: we used the car with its new battery three days, then took out for the weekend. Came back to use it: dead, drained battery.

We called AAA: they couldn’t test it, it was so flat. So they used the jumper box, and we got a little power out of it. A reading light came on. Ha! the culprit. So we tried for an hour to charge up the battery, but it had been too damaged, and they very kindly replaced the battery—again. We’re pretty sure the last one was too dead to resurrect, probably a collapsed cell, since we couldn’t jump it—but on this one, I’d left a reading light on.

And here’s what I learned:

1) a reading light draws a ferocious lot of current, more than a trickle charger puts in. Which is why the trickle charger we put on when we discovered it flat hadn’t a prayer of resurrecting it at all.

2) even better: back a couple of decades ago, car designers quit using generators and voltage regulators, relying only on the alternator to recharge the battery, and ever since then, cars have had this trouble: the number of gadgets installed that draw current EVEN WHEN THEY’RE OFF is huge. Your plug-ins; your computer; various whiz-bang gadgets, like your phone, etc.

3) The alternator on a 3 block trip will re-supply your car with, say, about 100 units of power. The 3-block trip DRAWS 150 from the battery, including 2 ignition-starts. So every 3-block trip you make is a net loss of 50 units, which adds up and up and up, sort of like slowly bleeding to death. If you drive at high speed for 30 minutes the alternator charges the battery up again to full. But if ALL you do is short trips, your car battery goes flatter and flatter and flatter, because the deficit is never made up.

4) add in the perpetual drain of a few electronic devices like the computer that makes the car work, your door locks, your clock, your plugged-in gps, and park the car for a few days unused, and down, down, down goes your battery. Leave it a certain number of days (depending on make, model, short-trip habits, and what you have installed) and you have a dead battery. Reliably. They lecture you about leaving devices plugged in around the house that eat up current? That’s nothing. Your car is rife with them, and collectively they’re battery-killers.

5) one of the newest BMW models has so many whiz-bangs you have to drive the car every 3 days or have it on a battery charger. If you have a short-trip car that you leave undriven for days and you have battery problems, get a trickle charger—there are models that you can plug in with the hood closed. But you do have to have a power source. If your car lives in an apartment parking lot, you simply have to drive it for 30 minutes once a week, no matter what. And if you are going to be gone on a 2-week trip, have the spouse drive YOUR car one day a week, to be sure you don’t have battery problems when you get home.

This little piece of info is not generally understood by the public at large, and I just thought I’d pass it on.