Four Lights

So, my oil level light has been going on-and-off for years now, but for the past several days it's been on a lot.  I put some oil in on Tuesday and then Sunday, but it hasn't seemed to work.  Sometimes it shuts off while I'm driving, but on Monday, when I went from work to that interview I alluded to in my last blog post to My Favorite Stripclub (Non-Cover Version) to home, it was more often than not.

On Sunday, while driving to Wendy's before heading off to the storage facility to look for my passport, I pump my brakes to back the car down the driveway, and I notice that the taillight warning light is on.  Again?  Shit!  Didn't I change one of these back in the fall?  I don't know which one it is, so I have to find the time to back my way up to a mirror to see which of the six in the back have to be changed.  I hope it's not the one I replaced back in the fall.  In the meantime, though, I have to leave with seeing that warning light on ... including all the way home on Monday.

What has behaved itself, sort of, is the Check Engine light.  It had not been on for some time, maybe two weeks or so ago it was on when I went to have coffee at Caffetto, then it came on again when I drove home.  But I hadn't seen it since -- until the drive home on Monday.

So let me take you to that drive home.  I'm on the highway, driving withe taillight warning light on.  Suddenly, the Check Engine light comes on.  Then, the low oil level light comes on.  I've seen the latter two amber lights on side-by-side, but never three.  But there is a fourth: Because I'm waiting to get gas on Double Discount Tuesdays, I'm driving with a near-empty fuel tank, and with the huge drive I had on Monday, it dipped low enough to slowly warm up the low gas light, too.

So dig, if you will, the picture: Not just one, or two, or three amber lights.  Oh no, not for this ambitious birthday boy who can't let go of a car which is giving him more problems than his psyche probably could tolerate.  No, my dashboard had four warning lights on at the same time, a definite first.  And the thing is, my heart rate didn't really go up all that much.  I've had all of these lights on, just not on all at once.  But my car seemed to drive fine all the way home.

Now I have to triage these lights.  Obviously I can just gas up the car today, although I wonder if my stress level will force me to do it before I go to work or if my fatigue level pushes that back till when I come back from work.  That taillight warning light will stay on till I'm out of work, damn it.  I assume that the Check Engine light's on because of our recent cold spell; once we finally reach spring, if it's still on, then I'll really start to worry.  But it's the low oil level light that bothers me.  I've put in a lot the past week, and still the sensor's on.  I don't want to be driving with the pistons grinding against metal.  But on the other hand I don't want to overfill my engine, either.  That sensor has to be unreliable, and I need to not panic and destroy the engine by dumping quarts of oil into it.

So that's why I embedding video of Captain Jean-Luc Picard screaming at the top of this blog post.  You know that he specifically wanted an episode about him being captured and tortured because of his work in the past with Amnesty International, don't you?