Today was a fob-ulous day

Today wasn’t supposed to be about any projects, and mostly it wasn’t. Impatience played a role in that, but mostly it was just a Saturday, and there was no reason to fill it with lots of work and such. I still managed to find a small victory. though.

I had two goals for today today: To exchange some button batteries I bought earlier this week for ones I actually needed and meant to get, and I also wanted to check out some stuff to finish the top shelf of the shelves I put in the kitchen.

I set out early this afternoon and headed to one of the home centres, the one where I’d bought the shelf supplies—because the two home centres carry different mostly entirely products. Of course. Once I got there, the carpark was packed and there was a queue of people waiting to get in (under Covid Level 2, there’s a limit to how many people can be in a shop at any given time, which varies depending on how big the place is so that people can keep a 2-metre space between themselves and anyone else. I changed my mind and got back in my car and headed to my next stop. Ain’t nothing I needed badly enough to make me wait in a queue at that store.

My next stop was the supermarket I went to earlier this week. That day, I bought a couple button batteries for my car’s key fobs, but got the wrong ones (the ones I bought were on the hook right next to the ones I wanted). Once I got there (and with no waiting to enter), it wasn’t obvious to me what I needed to do to exchange the batteries. So, I picked up some stuff I needed (including flour to replace what I used up with yesterday’s pizza), and then I went to the checkout.

The operator called over a supervisor who slowly and methodically worked out what to do to make the exchange, which apparently required her to issue a cash refund that she then used to “pay” for the new batteries. Odd, and pretty inefficient, I thought, but we got there in the end. It also reminded me that some things about that particular chain are difficult to navigate.

I then went home, and it was on to something that wasn’t a project, but just an ordinary life chore: I needed to change the batteries in my car’s key fobs.

“Fob” is a highfalutin word for a car’s remote, but the kind that’s a “proximity key” to let me unlock the car with the remote in my pocket, and without using an actual key. For my car, I need to press a button on the handle of the front doors (driver’s side or the passenger’s). With Nigel’s last car—the first time I’d ever seen such a thing—he just had to touch one of those two door handles. But, then, his car cost much more than mine.

Doing this was no big deal, of course, but I had to find out how to do it first (I had no idea). It was easy, it turns out, and cost me around $11 for the batteries for the two fobs. Dealers usually charge crazy money to do it for you, so I probably saved myself a bundle (the car goes into the dealer for its next regular service on the 15th, and I wanted the fob ready to go by then).

Things went well and easily, and I was able to unlock and re-lock my car using the remote from my front door, so clearly the battery works. It had been giving me more and more trouble, so much so that I usually had to use the emergency key to unlock the car (even with low batteries in the fob, the car will still start as long as the fob is near the start button). Changing the batteries should fix all that.

That wasn’t enough for me, though: I just had to sneak in one more little project, too. I wanted to raise the lowest shelf in my pantry so that I could store my new breadmaker at the bottom of the pantry. That went well, too (though at first I forgot to move up one of the five shelf supports; oops).

The space at the bottom of the pantry became available after Jake died: I had a tin to store his food in there (Leo, being younger and smaller, got different food, which I store in a different container). The only drawback to this change was that the bottle of canola oil I use whenever I need cooking oil will no longer fit on the shelf, where it was at a convenient height to grab while I was cooking. I’ll just have to find a shorter bottle, I guess, or be willing to bend over a bit more to lift it off the bottom of the pantry. In the meantime, the breadmaker is now out of sight (the old one was on the benchtop, and I want to keep that as clear as I can since the kitchen’s a little small, and the benchspace is limited).

My only other project for today was related to this blog, actually, but that’s an entirely different story.

The thing that made me the happiest today was totally unimportant: Those key fobs. I felt good about accomplishing it, probably because I had to figure it out and get it done. As I said on my personal Facebook, “sometimes the smallest victories are also the sweetest.” And, how sweet it was!