Yup, it was a dead battery.  Fortunately, as it was only a mile, I walked home, ate my lunch, then as Heather & the kids had arrived back at home, we hopped in the van to go back over.  I could have avoided this if I’d simply left the jumper cables in my trunk.  For some unknown reason, I took them out and left them in the garage after I’d last used them.

One jump start later, I was able to drive the car back home.  I grabbed the van keys, ran to Pep Boys and grabbed a new battery, as the old one was the original, now nearly 4 years old, and had a dark eye – i.e. It’s Dead Jim.  Swapping out the battery was easy enough, and then I found a new problem.  My radio has the anti-theft feature that requires a 5-digit code to unlock it.  Fortunately, after a bit of googling, I found that if you sit in the driver’s seat, open the glove box and look at the little sticker on the left side of the outer shell of the glove box, you’ll find two numbers.  The one on top is 5 digits.  Guess what?  It’s your radio code.

Wildly convenient for situations like this, but what if my radio were stolen?  Someone smart enough to steal a radio is probably also smart enough to look at a sticker that’s less than a foot away from the radio, right?