Raise your hand if you're getting tired of posts with the "Car Trouble" label

Yeah, me too.

So Alex was supposed to leave for Guanacaste (the north-western province) this morning, but his car wouldn't start. We tried to jump start it, but that didn't work, so we took the girls to school in the red car and then picked up a mechanic and brought him to the house to look at it (you can still do that here).

They messed around with the two cars for a while and eventually Alex told me that they'd taken the battery from the red car, put it in Alex's car, and that the old battery, now in the red car, had enough of a charge for me to start the car and go get a new one. Battery, that is.

So that's what I did.

Except that when they put the new battery in, the car still wouldn't start. The guy who had just finished installing the battery checked a few things, tried a few things, then told me it must be the starter.

Except that, you know, that car wasn't having any trouble starting till they put the bad battery into it this morning.

Long story short, coincidentally the red car now doesn't start, and it has nothing to do with the battery. Certainly nothing to do with the whole battery-swapping massacree, with the attendant circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one.

Which, by the way? Was the second (massacree, that is) this month. But that certainly couldn't be responsible for the red car suddenly having alternator issues and four blown fuses (not those little plastic tabby fuses either. The big, boxy fuses up under the hood.) No, entirely unrelated. Quite a coincidence, though, they'll grant you that.

Anyway.

I got the girls picked up, Joanna and her shopping home, stopped by an electromechanical repair place (whatever those're called in English), and made a tentative appointment for the morning, drove home and parked facing down a nice, steep downhill slope (my driveway) for the morning - all without turning off the car. Well, I did stall it once trying to back up the slope of the driveway, but I was - duhhh - on a nice steep slope, so it was easy to start again.

So now I have a brand new battery and a feeling of accomplishment - and a dead car. At least it was a nice day for it.