Dammit! I had to cancel flying.

Yesterday, my car informed me that the left headlight was burned out. This caused me to experience a major tantrum because I drive a Volvo, which is swedish for, "HaHaHa you fool! There is nothing you can fix on this car! You must take it to a dealer!" It has been my experience over the last 18 years of owning Volvos that replacing light bulbs is never easy. Ever.

Fortunately for me, I have the interwebs and I was able to find this informative, profanity-laced video on how to access and replace the left headlight.

Unfortunately, in the midst of all his colorful language, he neglected to mention that when you disconnect all of those hoses, vacuum lines and wires, you will cause a glitch in the matrix and the car's computer will make a random decision that there is a major problem with the brakes.

First it flashes a massage on the dashboard that says, "Reduced Brake Performance!"

Then it flashes a message on the dashboard that says, "Reduced Engine Performance!"

Then it goes into what is known as "limp mode".

Limp mode is a configuration where the computer tells the engine to run like shit and never accelerate beyond 15 or 20 miles per hour.

Oh, and by the way, it doesn't do this when you are in your driveway or on a side street. It waits until you are in the middle of a busy main drag going 40 mph. In my case, it came on quite suddenly while I was on Stony Hill Rd. heading to the Northampton Airport.

I managed to turn around , "limp" home and get the car in the garage. I called the airport, cancelled my lesson and texted my instructor just to be sure he got the message. Then I took all that "stuff" apart again just to make sure that nothing was disconnected.

After taking it apart and not finding anything amiss, I decided to go back to the intertubes to look up those two non-informative messages.

Amongst all of the talk about EMFs and AMTs and vacuum-assisted carborational hose clamps, I found one guy who said, "When you disconnect the throttle body wires and vacuum lines, you cause a glitch in the system. Try rebooting. Simply remove the negative battery cable from the battery for 10 minutes. The computer memory will flush itself, along with all the error codes, and you should be good to go."

Damned if he wasn't right.

I drained the ions from the electrical system and when I reconnected the battery cable, I still had a message about a brake issue but the engine ran fine. I drove around my neighborhood for a few minutes and the brake message went away.

Still, I was a little pissed that I had to cancel today's lesson. Today would have been three more touch & go's with my instructor and then three takeoff's & full stop landings as a solo. I was looking forward to it.

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Try these links out:

• Trust me, watch the video.



• Only in Alaska.



• Someone needs to teach their kids how to keep the family secrets...



• Ya think...