Zoe came home in her little car today and I told her that I’d fix the squeaking power steering belt and check it all out while she was here.

It’s not a big deal to tighten the belt a little and add some power steering fluid, so I got out my tools and brought them down to the lower part of the property, and got going on the little Sentra.

When I’d finished the job and went to move the car, it wouldn’t start.

Apparently, I’d broken the thing while fixing the thing.

That kind of stuff happens.

Before the internet, you were flying blind.

If you didn’t have a father or uncle….or aunt or sister or mother….with a lot of mechanical experience, you didn’t have anyone you could call on for guidance.

The internet gives you access to a ton of people with problems….and some of the people have even figured out how to fix them.

I spent the afternoon looking stuff up….jiggling wires….and finally got it to start and up on ramps so I could crawl underneath it and see if I could see anything that I might have bumped while I was working on the belt-tightening.

I never did figure out what was going on….even though, until the last bit of jiggling….and unplugging and re-plugging, the intermittent cranking was getting me pretty bothered.

In the end of it all, I must have jiggled the right thing , because I couldn’t get it to “not work” again, and I felt OK about sending them on their way later this evening.

That’s the trouble with something that sometimes happens….you lose faith….and, when you have lost faith in something, you’ve really lost everything.

I got her car to start pretty consistently….and she and Isaac should be able to make it back up to school without any problem.

I wish that I could know that it will always start in the future, though.

Wondering is a pain in the rear.

Knowing that things break makes me less confident about a lot of stuff.

(The picture is of the starter and the wires going to it. If you crawl underneath the car….if it is up on ramps and you can fit underneath the car….you can see it if you are on the passenger side of the vehicle. You have to take it out from below….if the starter is bad and not just a bad connection. You have to lay in the gravel to take it out from below. Don’t break stuff fixing stuff. What a pain in the rear….)