Well the folks at Edison decided that today was a good day to mess around with the power which left me without electricity for about 6 hours. Luckily I had planed some minor DIY Auto repair things to do.

First was replacing the battery terminals. I asked my pal Joseph to come over and help me out. We had this trouble on the way up to Vegas – the terminal connections were so corroded that they easily got moved out of position. I purchased a box of terminals yesterday to only realize today that the box of terminals only had one terminal. Fantastic…

The second thing on my repair list was the blinking right turn light. The light had be blinking at twice the rate for the last year or so. It never died so I just lived with it. Not anymore… add new signal light to the shopping list.

And finally the pet peeve of mine – the second accessory cigarette lighter on my car had been out for over 2 years now. So for the longest time I’ve been using only one lighter to power all my accessories (GPS, phone charger, earpiece charger…). After prying apart the driver side interior (something I’m sure the engineers at Toyota didn’t want me to do because the made it so bloody hard) I was able to yank out that cigarette lighter.

Upon a cursory examination I found nothing wrong with it… so I might as well just get a new one at the store.

At Pep Boys I bought a second terminal, the yellow blinker light bulbs but no cigarette lighter that would match the one that came out of the car. We found no compatible item at Auto Zone as well.

Back at home I was determined to find out what was wrong with the cigarette lighter that I took out. It took a while but I discovered a broken wire. I yanked out the last bits of broken wire and soldered in a new wire connector.

And it worked!!!

I was so amazed I even vacuumed my car!

Feels so good to have those three things fixed up. Like driving a new car….

…almost…

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