Flat

I'm late in sharing this story with you but I'm sure you will enjoy it just the same. A week or two ago Nick and Kate got up to head to Yiayia's house for the day on Thursday morning as usual and Nick quickly realized he couldn't take his car because the front passenger tire was flat. Not just pretty low, but sitting-on-the-ground flat.  So I told him I'd take care of it and he took the van that day.

I posted the above picture to Instagram, which alerted my mother to the situation. I was initially just going to call the Roadside Service guys from my insurance and see if my driveway qualified as roadside, but Mom and Richard offered to come over and change it instead. After getting the tire off we found the culprit: a rather large screw has decided to make its presence known in my tire.

While the car was sitting on its rinky dinky little jack, and the tire was laying on the ground, and we were trying to decide if we should put the spare on so I could drive it to get the tire fixed or if we should just take the tire and then come back, the car fell off the jack. CRASH! Well, not really crash, but the sound of the car hitting my driveway was quite loud. Thankfully Richard wasn't underneath the car, but it scared the poop out of me because I was sitting inside the car. (Note to self- don't get in the car when it's jacked up.)

Yep, flat on the ground.  Richard had to stick his big jack underneath the back end of the car just so we could free the tiny little jack that had fallen over and was now lodged under the frame. Just to make things more interesting and fun, the tiny little jack bent when it fell. It still works-ish, but we should probably buy a new one. Not that I have any big plans of repeating this saga. Next time? I'm calling Roadside Assistance.

We put the spare on the car because Richard had an appointment he had to make so the plan was then for me to take Mom home and go to NTB. Richard left for his appointment. Mom and I gathered our things and headed to the car, which was stuck in park. The parking brake was sticking up at a very odd isn't-supposed-to-look-like-that angle and neither one of us could get it to disengage. We beat on it, we rocked the car back and forth, up and down, we pulled up and pushed down on the handle and button and did everything except take the hammer to the parking brake button. It wouldn't budge. The car was pretty much useless at this point.

We went back in the house and I called Bill for help, who was conveniently 150 miles away. I wasn't in a big rush, but Richard would be back before then so Mom and I had no choice but to wait. We did a little googling but nothing we tried worked for us.

Richard finally arrived back at the house and sat in the driver's seat and pushed in the parking brake button which pleasantly and happily popped free for him. JUST LIKE THAT.
Seriously.

Neither myself nor Mom was amused as his apparent super human strength because FOR REAL - we BOTH tried to get that parking brake to pop for us. All he did was PUSH THE BUTTON. It's rigged, I tell you.

I headed off to NTB on my pitiful little spare tire and learned that not only had the screw poked a hole in my tire, it had gone into the sidewall too so the whole tire needed to be replaced. I walked across the street to Chapps for a burger and fries while they fixed it...I needed some sort of treat after all that.