all right already!

Jeez, you'd think you people had nothing better to do than obsessively check my blog eight times a day. I'm sorry it's so upsetting, but haven't you heard of RSS? Gosh.

For those who have not been harassing me, thank you for your patience. We now resume regularly scheduled programming.

Here's a story for you. I don't remember if I blogged about it a couple months ago when I ran over some scissors in the road -- SCISSORS(?!) -- and got a flat tire, then spent a good 20 minutes trying to get my spare out of the trunk because it was frozen down. Note to self: in the future, dry spare very carefully before putting it back in the trunk, at least in the winter.

Then, a week or so ago I hit the world's largest pothole on my way to work. I thought "Whew, good thing cars don't pinch-flat." The fine city of St. Paul was kind enough to fix this pothole a mere day and a half after it appeared, which tells you how big this pothole was. This pothole was like the car-sized version of the one that took Sascha out last spring on Delaware Ave. Anyway, despite all my gloating about cars not pinch-flatting, I discovered that night that my hubcap was missing, so now my car is all ghetto-looking. Stupid pothole.

Anyway, long story short, cars do pinch-flat. It just takes longer. Today I was leaving to go to lunch when a lady from the office building next to ours came running out to tell me that my tire was flat (it's on the passenger side, so I didn't see it). So I had to change my tire in the parking lot, which was fun because whoever changed that tire last put the lug nuts on so damn tight that even jumping up and down on the wrench didn't loosen them until I'd been jumping for a good ten minutes PER NUT, and then once they were all off and the car was jacked up the wheel was -- wait for it -- FROZEN ON, and wouldn't come off. Fucking Minnesota. Pieces of my car should not FREEZE TOGETHER every time I need to change a tire.

So I yanked on it so hard I pulled a muscle in my shoulder. I felt it. It went RRRRRRRRRRRIP!! So now I have a gimpy leg AND a gimpy shoulder, and I am quickly running out of athletic activities to do. I can't run, or ride my bike, or use the stairmaster, and now I can't lift weights either. Lame, lame, lame.

Ultimately it seems the way to un-freeze a tire is to ninja-kick it a few times, so good thing I watched so many Ninja Turtles cartoons when I was a kid. Even though it got me mocked mercilessly because I was "too old" for Ninja Turtles, seeing as how I was in fifth grade and Ninja Turtles were for third graders. Whatever dude, I knew it would come in handy one day. Anyway, I got the tire off, put the donut spare on, and off I went to get it fixed.

But no! Foiled again! Not only did I pinch-flat very slowly, that pothole actually bent my rim, so I left the repair place with the donut STILL on, and I have to go back tomorrow and pay them one meeellion dollars to straighten my rim. Perhaps I should kindly request that the City of St. Paul pay for it, since they're the ones with the three-foot-diameter pothole in the middle of the on-ramp.

On the bright side, at least this time around I know how to change the tire, which wasn't really the case with the truck. I also got two flats in six weeks with the truck, back in 2003, the first time halfway up a jeep trail on Purgatory Mountain in Colorado (I left the giant metal bolt sticking into the tire and hightailed it back down the mountain, praying that the air would leak slowly enough that I could find people before it went totally flat), and the second time at 2:00 AM in the middle of Albuquerque when I hit a clump of barbed wire (in the middle of the highway) and tore a ten-inch gash in the sidewall. That one was even better - I flagged down some random old dude and begged so pathetically that he had no choice but to help, and as he was fixing my tire he told me that he was a Vegas lounge singer doing an old timey cowboy act, and not only that, he had a box full of demo CDs in his car, and when he was done with the tire he gave me one of those demo CDs. I still have it. It was terrible.

I went to WalMart to get the first one repaired, because WalMart is all there is in the middle of rural New Mexico. I handed over the truck, told them it was the right rear wheel, and sat in the waiting room for an hour and a half. Finally I was just fed up, because how long can it really take to fix a flat. I asked about it and the doofus at the desk said "oh, that one's done. It wasn't flat." I said the hell it wasn't, and the guy showed me my perfectly good, not-at-all-flat SPARE. No shit the spare isn't flat. Never go to WalMart, guys.

And those are all my flat tire stories. This is what you get when I have nothing to say but you pester me for blog posts anyway. I refuse to apologize.