CSA

Short for Car Service Announcement, instead of the Community Supported Agriculture I'm usually raving about.

If the ebrake light and your battery light come on at the same time, the internet thinks you should already know that your car alternator is shot and your battery is going to subsequently die on you at some point in the near future.

Thursday I was driving an hour down to work to catch a flight up to Portland when all the warning lights in my car flickered on and off, twice. This plus a whine that had been going on for 2 weeks caused me to worry, but I got to the airport fine and flew away, and it was only on the drive home Friday that I started noticing my car really acting funny. On the offramp to my house, also after an hour of driving, my radio started to fade (also an obvious sign of impeding battery failure) to off, and then all of a sudden the brake light and battery light were on and my car was not responding to the gas pedal - lucky for me it was rush hour traffic and the lane was creeping at 5 mph anyways. So I put my emergency blinkers on and limped home for a grueling 10 minutes at 2 mph - the engine would skip a lot so i would have to tap the gas and wait for it to engage before slowly keeping my foot on the gas and crossing my fingers that the gas would keep working. Lucky I made it home, lucky it lasted as long as I did, and lucky I have AAA to tow it to my favorite garage for repair (thanks Car Talk!). I'm incredibly lucky. I keep thinking about what would have happened if it had died any earlier on 101N in the mist at 80mph...whew!