Baptism by Tire

I've been in a cleaning frenzy lately. We've lived her over three years and there are cabinets and closets in my house that have gotten so disorganized that it's almost impossible to find anything and they're half full of garbage. There's things that we put on high shelves to keep away from the kids that we need to move to low shelves to give the kids access to now (like cereal). So, with a motivation so bizarre that it could only have come from drugs slipped into my food by some altruistic neat freak, or an alien takeover of my body and soul I have spent the better part of my weekends cleaning and organizing my closets and cupboards.

So, yesterday it was the kitchen cabinets. I cleaned out the cabinet over the oven where I keep oil and vinegar, alcohol, soy sauce and generally anything that's tall because it's a very large cabinet like "Fix a Flat" which is this can of putrid goo and compressed air that you hook into a flat tire and it usually gives you enough air and time to get home or get somewhere and get a tire fixed. I gave Rich the can of "Fix a Flat" that was in my olive oil/liquor cabinet to take to the garage. He had never heard of it be cause he "had never had a flat tire before."

Famous last words, right? He went into the garage for something else and was going to put the Fix a Flat into his car but his car was locked, so he stuck it into the minivan.

Later that SAME day, he had a Man Date with his friend Ben in Arlington last night. He's needed a Man Date for a while and the last 2 out of three got canceled so this was really important to him. On the way back, his car slid down an icy hill towards a red light. Rather than slide into the intersection, he decided to hit the curb instead. The car stopped and he continued on, but soon realized that his tire was flat.

At 11:00 PM I got the call. The Fix a Flat was in the minivan. He was in the CRV. The kids were asleep and I was alone so I couldn't go bring it to him. I have a long history of driving old junkers in my teens and twenties and I gave him a few pointers on how to change a tire (If 17 year old me could do it alone, you can do it too!). And then Iwaited. And waited. And waited.

There was something wrong wit the Jack where it didn't lift the car quite high enough to line up the holes on the new tire once he had the old tire off. He ended up stuffing a small, flat rock between thhe jack and the car and that gave him the room he needed to get it lined up. But it took hours to get all that figured out and he was doing this in the middle of a snowstorm.

Poor guy. His plumber's crack filled with snow.

Sorry.. shouldn't have gone there. Stopping now.