Whatta Day

I had great plans for this afternoon which were sidelined when I walked out of the supermarket at around 2:15pm. I was in the driver's seat, about to push my car into gear, when this guy who was talking outside his truck on a cell phone called out to me that my front tire was flat. What?!!!! Urrrrrrr.. So, I got out of my car, and, sure enough, my left front tire was as flat as a pancake. The strange thing was that prior to going to the supermarket I'd stopped at a kosher deli and the same truck was parked next to me there, so alarm bells started going off in my head. I don't know if that's a sign of the times we live in or just a sign that I watch too much television and am now highly paranoid, but I was very nervous when I opened my trunk, half expecting that he was going to shove me into it or something. All he did was take the jack and very calmly walk over to my dead tire. Phew!!! But I was still paranoid. After arguing with the lug nuts (the tire was brand new and the mechanics had used power tools to affix it to my Kia) for awhile, we finally managed to get them loose, with him pulling on them and me jumping on the tire iron. It must have looked hilarious, because my daughter was howling with delight in the back seat of the car. This poor man, dripping with sweat (did I mention that it was around 86 degrees outside today?) put the spare on my car, lowered the jack and then promptly informed me that the spare was also flat. He offered to drive me to the gas station to put air in it but I was still paranoid, even after all of this, and besides that I had the baby with me, so I called my husband and he called some of his guys and they came and got the tire to have it fixed while I took my daughter to get something to eat (we hadn't eaten lunch yet and were both starving and cranky by this time). It turned out that the valve had gone bad in the tire, which was why I couldn't find any nails or tacks or glass stuck into the rubber. So, now it's 6pm and I'm just getting around to doing my hair, which looked REALLY bad due to the fact that I knew I was going to do it today and so didn't wash it this morning. We are meeting some friends tonight to watch the Red Sox game at a local sports bar/restaurant so now I'm going to have to really hustle to be ready in time. Why is it that I always seem to be in situations where I have, despite my best intentions, to rush around like a maniac to be on time getting someplace??? Anyway, I have to be grateful. If this guy hadn't been in the parking lot by my car I wouldn't have been able even to change the tire, and if my husband didn't have guys working in the area I would've had to wait for much longer for him to show up and probably would not have been able to have gotten the tire fixed today. And that's my story for today.