He who hesitates . . .

Our 2003 Prius had been showing its age -- electronic door locks that don't work; air conditioning that's, shall we say, unreliable; a broken lid for the console between the driver's and passenger's seats; more dings and scrapes than you can count -- so we'd been thinking about replacing it, maybe in April.

Hah!

Two weeks ago the battery died.  (No, not THE battery; rather the one that Prius calls the auxiliary battery and that I call the 12-volt battery.)

I hoped we could buy an el cheapo replacement somewhere so we wouldn't need to have our trade-in towed into the dealership.

I wasn't much in the mood to do the deed myself, however, so I jump started the car and took it to the repair shop to let them do it.  Good thing, because the deal wasn't as simple as you might think.  Not simple at all, in fact.  It wound up taking the shop three days to obtain the correct replacement part.  But I don't want to get into that.  Suffice it to say that parts and labor came to about $175.  If we'd gone car shopping just a little bit sooner, we could have saved ourselves that expense (and a full tank of gas).

 Good timinng, huh?

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