What the Hell Is Going On?

I've been meaning to take my car to get the back passenger-side tire either repaired or replaced recently. Sometime during our wandering during July, the tire developed a leak that required me to put more air in the tire about every other week. The first time the low air light went on we were in Cleveland and I wasn't sure there was actually a problem with the tire. It wasn't until our trip home a couple of weeks later when I had to refill the tire that I knew I needed to do something about it. I had meant to get this done last Saturday, but stuff happened and it slipped my mind.

So it wasn't a surprise when K called me and asked me to come into town to help her change the tire. Irritating, yes, but not surprising. I had been wondering earlier in the day if K had been paying attention to the tire and making sure it wasn't going visibly flat. I doubted she had, so I just assumed she'd let the tire run really low and it had just worn the sidewalls out. She has to be at school extra early this first week so she's been leaving before me and taking E and the car and leaving me with the old pickup truck with no air conditioning. I also really hate having to leave the house after I get home from school and I knew this wasn't going to be a pleasant experience. Changing any tire with the basic equipment that comes with car when the lugnuts were put on with a mechanic's air wrench is going to be a pain in the ass and it was really freaking hot yesterday. To add to my irritation, it turns out that it wasn't the leaky tire that had gone flat. It was the other back tire that had gone entirely flat and suddenly. I wasn't even going to get to blame the flat on K. Damn. That would have at least made me feel a little bit better.

So I take E to my parents' house so my dad can watch him for a while. The car seat was with K in town (she'd gone to get dinner and left the kid with me) so I couldn't just have him on the bench seat next to me all the way there. After dropping E off with his favorite person in the world, I drove off to meet K and change the tire.

Now Mickey knows from experience how hard it is to get the nuts off of my tire with that little lug wrench that came with the car and this time was even worse. I pushed and pulled on the two that wouldn't crack loose until I started seeing stars and had to stop from feeling dizzy. Luckily, there was a guy who was getting gas at the station where K had pulled in and probably wanted to stop my steady stream of profanities who pulled out one of those big t-shaped wrenches with four different size heads. That did the trick. With half of the effort both sticking nuts loosened and the rest of the job went well.

Except for the fact it was 7 p.m. and I had one flat tire, one leaking tire, and I was driving on a donut. Luckily, this semester I have first block planning so I could head out to the tire place first thing in the morning get the tires replaced and be into work without missing anything that would cause any problems. Plus, I had my last flat tire back in June in north Georgia and had gone to the tire center at the Wal-Mart in Athens because the only other tire place I knew about was booked solid. For some reason I had paid an extra ten bucks per tire to get the warranty so they'd be repaired for free should any damage from the road occur, so I expected this to be a cheap problem to fix.

Turns out that I was incredibly wrong. The closest Wal-Mart with a tire center to my house is in the opposite direction from my school about 9 miles away from my house. After that the next closest is about 30 miles away. I got up at my normal time and leave the house when I'd normally leave for school and drove to Wal-Mart to get my tires repaired for free only to find out that the Wal-Mart closest to me doesn't work on tires with air sensors. I'd either have to spend and hour on the road going to the other Wal-Mart and back to school or I'd just have to pay for the work at the local mechanic that I know would do good work.

I chose the latter option. I spent 20 minutes waiting for one tire to be repaired (the leaky one) and one to be replaced (the flat one that looked like a topographical map on the back when the tire guy reinflated it to check it out) and I walked out $80 poorer but still with enough time to get to school before I had any duty or students to worry about.

Still not the way I want to start the day and now I have to see if I can get Wal-Mart to refund me the $20 I wasted on getting the extra warranty on these tires. Jerks.