I had to pop out on Friday afternoon, but when I got to my car I found my neighbour was sitting in the open door of hers with her 2yo asleep on the backseat and the new-born being appallingly cute on the middle bench seat. As our drives are physically contiguous, this put my car's engine within 2m of both of them.

"I'll just roll out onto the street and start the engine there," I told her, not wanting to present her with two crying children.

Starting it rolling was no problem, that part of the drive is on a slight slope, so just insert the key, knock it out of gear and take the handbrake off. But the streetside half of the drive is much steeper, and as it started to pick up speed I braked to check there was no one coming, and automatically stuck it in gear* as I did so.

That was a problem, because doing it without the engine running immediately engaged the steering lock, and the weight of the car on the slope meant I also couldn't get it out of gear. And you can't start the car with it in gear. The only way** to get it out of gear and out of steering lock in those circumstances is to physically push it forward slightly to take the weight off the drivetrain. But it was on the slope, facing uphill, and my normal stick a leg out to ease it slightly forward wasn't going to work.

So that meant getting out of the car to physically shove it forward, but as soon as I took the handbrake off and knocked it out of gear, it was going to start rolling backwards.

That's okay, thinks I, I can just grab the handbrake to stop it.

So I knock the handbrake off, put my shoulder to the car and rock it forward

The pressure on the gear lever frees up and I knock it out of gear. At which point it immediately starts to accelerate backwards.

I grab the handbrake and yank it on.

Car continues to accelerate backwards.

Sh*t! F*ck!

The only solution was to dive into the (slowly) moving car and stamp on the brake pedal, which stopped it just short of the road.

I am amazed I got away with no more than a bruised shin.

Also a good reminder that the handbrake is a parking brake and not a moving brake!

* Just to be weird, my car is a semi-automatic - no clutch pedal, but a conventional gearstick.

** There's probably something buried in the manual, but I know rocking it forward works.

Current Mood: Stupid

£110 for a new battery for the car because the current one had died due to underuse when I went to start the car yesterday. The AA guy took one look at the milometer and asked me if it was worth keeping the car on the road given I'm only doing about 1000miles/.year. I pointed out that as a wheelchair user it's sort of essential to have a car to get anywhere at all.

Which reminds me of the story in yesterday's Observer about cities planning to tax businesses for providing parking for their employees:

Tax on parking: UK cities to impose levy on cars in bid to cut pollution

£550/year seems to be the amount being suggested, which would have cost Evil Aerospace several million per annum for my site alone. The intention seems to be to try to force workers to rely on public transport to get to work. No one seems to have realised (or is it to care?) that this will have an inevitably chilling effect on the employment of disabled people, because the inevitable result will be that many employers will give up on providing car parks entirely, or limit them only to senior managers. Then when a disabled person dependent on their car looks for a job they'll have to write-those employers off as somewhere they just can't get to, or if they've kept a few spaces face arguing that some manager has to give their space up for them, which is sure to be wonderful for their continuing career prospects.

Public transport just can't substitute for people with severe mobility issues. There was a bus-stop at almost the closest point on a public road outside Evil Aerospace, and I would still have had a 600m walk to get to the office. By the end of the working day I was frequently struggling just to get from my desk to my car in the nearest disabled parking bay to the door. And even in a massive car park we actually had fewer disabled bays by the building than disabled drivers in the building. Taxing companies for providing employee parking will end up pushing disabled people out of the workforce.

And a story I'd have seen much sooner if living in a time of plague hadn't pushed my tweetdeck disability columns far to the right of where my screen ends:

https://domesticemployers.org/hand-in-hand-grieves-the-loss-of-engracia-figueroa/

The TLDR is that United Airlines destroyed the powerchair of a disability activist with a custom seating solution, she developed a pressure sore while sitting in an inappropriate 'loaner' chair* for five hours at the airport trying to get them to understand the issue, and three months later she died of complications from that pressure sore. It's basically the nightmare scenario for wheelchair users, and it's precisely the scenario we've been trying to get the airlines to understand for years, that a general loaner chair is not an appropriate or safe solution for someone with specialist seating needs.

* If a picture I came across on line was of the loaner in question, I'm flabbergasted, because it was basically a glorified evac chair, not even a transit chair, and would have been inappropriate for anyone to sit in for more than a few minutes, never mind someone with specialist seating needs.

Current Mood: discharged

Just had a knock on the door. "Hi buddy, I'm a scrap-man. Do you want to sell that little Toyota on your drive, it obviously hasn't been moved in a while."

I was out in it yesterday!

And while it admittedly is a little lichen-spotted, that's what happens to cars who spend most of their time in the open under the eaves of a house and whose owners can't wash them very often.

Ironically I was planning on giving it it's semi-annual wash this afternoon as it's booked in for its MOT on Friday.

Current Mood: aggravated
Current Location: David's Carwash
Current Music: I've been driving in my car, Madness

I realised yesterday that with Christmas and lockdown I hadn't been out in the car since the 20th - so pretty much three weeks. I decided I'd better give it a run and it was as well I did. I got out to the car to find that the last time I'd used it I'd left the solar charger I bought after killing a battery in Lockdown 1 face down in the passenger footwall, which doesn't do a lot for it's charging efficiency*. And when I turned the key there was a very distinctly laboured "whhhhhhrrrr" before the engine caught, so the charge was right on the edge of not being able to turn the starter.

But it did manage, so I took it out for a drive for a while to charge up the battery and I'll try and do it a couple of more times this week, but whoops, that was close.

* The idea isn't to charge the battery enough to use, but to keep enough charge flowing into it that I don't get cells dying, as has happened regularly in the past - that way the AA will just need to jump-start me, not sell me a new battery.

Current Mood: discharged
Current Location: Flat

Still lacking in energy post-heat wave, I think I need several weeks of sound sleeping to get back to normal.

Managed to get the car through the annual MoT test yesterday, which was a huge relief as I wouldn't have the time to fix any issues. Didn't initially realise the mechanic had altered the seat position (pretty much inevitable as he has to access the rear seats - to check the seat belts - and it's a two door), which led to me realising half-way through driving for another errand that I wasn't getting any back support, and while I fixed it at the next set of traffic lights that was too late to prevent back-ache setting in, and settling down for the rest of the day. Grrr!

I'm off to Durham in the morning. LNER (ex-Virgin ECML)'s half-assed system where you buy a ticket, then contact them to find out if the wheelchair seat is available had the ultimately inevitable happen and all three wheelchair spaces on my booked service turn out to be already full. So I'm travelling on an earlier train than my ticket is for, with a note from Passenger Assistance saying "it's not his fault". Double Grrr!

I'd really prefer not to be travelling, too much time away from home turns out to mess me up, and this year has been bad for that - it's going to be around 3 months by the end of the year, but I plan to try and use it to get back into the habit of writing daily, as I'm usually on my own quite a lot of the time I'm up there, though with my sister on holiday from school that may be less than usual.

Have some disability poetry: (as in, by disabled poets, and mostly about disability).

There's probably other stuff I can't think of right now, but I need to get myself moving and organising for tomorrow.

Current Mood: rushed
Current Location: Preparing for launch

Or day and a bit.

I've really not been out of the house much this year, one bug after another and winter weather, etc, so yesterday afternoon I decided I really needed to pop out, at least to the supermarket. So I got myself ready, got the chair into the car, buckled up, turned the ignition, and the car went "wwwrrrrr".

Flat battery, enough power to work the dashboard, not enough to work the starter. I guess I really haven't been using it. It was getting dark at that point, so I left it for today.

Just to add to the fun, I woke up this morning with neckache. My neck is a lot better than it used to be*, but I'm having a day where I can't decide whether I'm happier with a collar on, or off, which is a real pain in the neck. The pain levels aren't actually that high, but come with associated nausea and a slight light-headed feeling, which isn't my favourite thing.

I missed my chance to snag my neighbour and ask for a jump start, so I had to go for my battery charger, which has a solid record of charging my battery - it's never worked yet. I don't think it has the oomph to charge an actually discharged battery. So picture me fiddling about under the bonnet, while wearing a collar and unable to look down properly. Also picture me confirming 4 hours later the battery charger has kept up its record. I'll see if I can catch my neighbor tomorrow, if not I'll have to dig around and find the contact details for whoever my homestart is with this year.

And to add to the fun I remembered to go out and check whether there was any damage from this week's storms - something was making a disturbingly metallic screeching noise while the wind was blowing. So picture me trying to look at the roof of the house while wearing a hard collar - just as well I have a long garden. The roof of the house is, thankfully, fine. Then I looked down.

The roof of the shed, not so much. Fortunately it's just the tarpaper that's ripped and flapping loose, the wooden roof is intact, but it will still need replacing properly at some point. For now, picture me wearing a hard collar, tacking down a rip that's a foot above my head and as far away as I can reach.

I have a bottle of wine, and I think I'm fully entitled to use it.

* I wore a hard collar 23/7 for pretty much a decade. The root problem was probably a C5/6 disc prolapse, but it just wouldnt get better, As far as I can tell the problem was the way I limped putting lateral stresses on my neck, it finally went away spontaneously when I started using crutches and my limp smoothed out.

Current Mood: blah
Current Location: Flat
Crossposts: http://dwgism.livejournal.com/28912.html

My car, that is.

This might not seem so monumental an achievement, but it's the first time in years it's started when I turn the key after being away over Christmas. It's sort of my fault, sort of one of those things, but I drive it so little (c2000 miles a year) that there's never a great charge on the battery, and three or four weeks sitting outside in over-Christmas weather without being driven is often enough to drain the battery. I've actually had two batteries fail completely, the chemistry in one cell being just too far gone to charge them back up, but mostly it's been the case of getting the nice man from the AA or RAC (whichever has the Toyota contract this year) to hook up his boost box (battery on steroids) and jump it that way, then running the engine for long enough to put a decent charge on the battery. I do have a battery charger, but mostly it doesn't have the oomph to overcome the chemistry problems in this situation, where the boost-box and car do. This year I thought my odds were even worse, as being hospitalized meant it had hardly been driven in December at all, but I turned the key and it worked.

Not sure there's a moral to this tale, other than thank god it started and I can go places when I need too!

Current Mood: relieved
Current Location: At the wheel (well, not now, but I was)
Current Music: I've been driving in my car, Madness