No upswing

So when we got home yesterday we both were very excited that for the first time in more than two months there was basically no standing water in the yard.  Not only was the surface water gone but the mud that was left behind had actually dried enough to be plain old dirt in some spots, wow.  I wasted little time before getting on the tractor and mowing down the high grass in the previously unmowable areas.  I didn’t have time to mow everything. Well imagine my joy when I came home today to see that a f’ing deluge had once again submerged a good portion of the grass.  I was already very frustrated before I got home because of more fun during the day.

At work the AC system in our NOC (network operations center) took a shit so we were scrambling to come up with alternative cooling as the problem is not a quick/easy fix.  Then at lunch I turned on the Prius and was greeted with a big scary red triangle warning light as well as a DSC and CEL.  The car seemed to still be driving ok although the variable speed transmission did feel weird a few times.  I drove it to the gym and home, hoping to pull a code with my reader to give me some direction to the problem, from my research could be one of MANY things.

When I hooked up the reader it found no stored codes but when I issued a clear all codes command it turned off all the warning lights.  The lights stayed off after turning the car off and on several times so I need to drive it some more to see what happens.  The problem, which had me looking for info online brought to light some maintenance I should be doing on the car like replacing the inverter and engine coolant, as well as the the transmission fluid, none of which has been done since we owned the car.  The transmission fluid is my first target based on the odd shifting I saw.

After the high levels of stress and frustration that was injected into portions of the road trip I had hoped our return home would be uneventful.  Oh well, you can’t always get what you want, or something like that.