Well, interesting thing happened this morning (meaning the morning of December 13, not December 14.). I went to sleep somewhere around 4 AM and, after waking up at 9 AM in order to head into town to my local game shop, Games Unlimited, which I head to once a week to get out of the house.
In any case, I was rushed to get out the door fast by my mother, who wanted to get to the post office before it closed. I complied in trying to get ready as fast as possible. As we were about to leave, my mother found a flat tire on her car. Needless to say, she was very irate. As she was under a lot of stress from this, I decided it would be best not to say a word. She called my uncle, who is a retired industrial mechanic, to come down to fix his car. My uncle then suggested something that most people would have thought of already: replace the tire with a spare.
As my mother was still in the final stages of recovering from back surgery, she couldn't bend over to change the flat tire. As this was the case, she asked me to change it for her. Being the kindhearted person I am, I complied and started to get ready to change it. As it was, there were only three pairs of mittens available for use. A pair of fingerless mittens that I couldn't use, a pair of mittens whose coloring closely resembled that of a grape. The third pair colored almost exactly in the manner of a watermelon slice with the exception of the black sleeves.
I took the grape-colored gloves and went out to try and change the tire. After looking everywhere for a hydraulic-based jack that my grandfather had given my mother, I found another jack that seemed to have come standard with the car. Now here's the kicker: The jack looks like it was state-of-the-art back in the 1930's. While it didn't look very complicated, I couldn't really figure out how to use it as there were no instructions as well as the fact that I had never changed a tire before in my life.
My mother was standing behind me telling me what to do, occasionally sobbing by saying things like 'This is why men should be doing this crap...' and that was rather insulting. This being the case, I tried my hardest to tell her to shut up in as nice of a tone as I could possibly manage. I rarely ever get angry or irritated with people, but that one time was one of the few exceptions that just got under my skin.
I finally figured out how to operate the jack and I replaced the tire with little hassle. As it turned out, the tire was punctured by a stray nail, most likely one that had been discarded during the rebuilding of our porch. In any case, after I had removed the tire, I was forced to take a brake due to the sheer cold weather outside while I was doing this. To replace the tire, as to not harm my back, I sat down on a patch of ice that was near the car.
By the time I took a break, even with mittens on, my fingers as well as my rear end were both frozen numb, even to the extent that my legs were shaking uncontrollably. After taking a few minutes to warm myself up, I changed my mittens to the watermelon-colored ones and finished changing the tire to the spare. When I was done, I needed to change my pants as the ice patch I was sitting on melted a little, making the seat of my pants rather wet.
Anyway, that's just another thing I guess I had a knack for doing. But then again, once I figured it out, it wasn't really all that difficult.
So in the end, just another addition to my many talents, yes?
