The Ravings of Demented Rabbits

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So, you know, here I am. Highway 99, middle of nowhere, coming home after a reasonably lengthy day. Looking forward to some food.

*BANG!*

Whoops, that didn't sound so great. Wonder what it was...

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Oh hell. I've got a flat. Doesn't that just suck. So I pull over, which is no small accomplishment, considering that the shoulder of 99 is just about wide enough to ride a bike on, if you've got small tires and don't mind the 2 foot drop if you slip. Turned out my right rear tire had a fairly nice gash in the side, which pretty much killed any chance of making it very far. Too, attempting to change it for the spare right then and there had the chance of sucking quite a lot. But then I remembered: I'm almost to Greenberry! So I leap back in the car and hobble down to Greenberry at 35mph.

Now, you have to understand that Greenberry is not, shall we say, a central hub of Western Civilization. You've got the store/tavern, and you've got a couple houses, and that's what you've got. But you've also got a parking lot, and rain or no, vast mud puddles reminiscent of the vast uncharted reaches of the Pacific or no, it's flat.

So I've got this flat tire. And, while I have the tools and the spare to change the tire, it just so happened that I had never actually done the changing of a tire, which is one of those things that I had sort of faintly worried about for a few years, but always put off in favor of doing more gaming or something. And rightly so. Changing a tire isn't too tough, although you'd think they could've designed a jack with a slightly better crank. Like, you know, one that actually worked.

To make a long story short, I got to limp along at 35mph on my spare back to Monroe, which took far more time than it should have, and I had to restrain myself from going 65, which was really the worst part of the whole experience.

Now, what I should have done is gone right back to Corvallis and taken care of business, but being not that wise, I went back to Monroe, slept, then went the 5 miles into Junction City the next day, on the theory that they were nice and close. Only to have the tire guy tell me that actually, for some reason my model Escort has bizzare tire sizes, and they didn't have any, but Corvallis did. Life, it seems, has a sense of humor.

Not that recognizing that made driving on my spare into Corvallis any more fun. At least I found out that getting up to 55 wouldn't kill me, but the whole spare-tire-is-inch-shorter-than-real-tires thing kind of sucked, and involved a lot of wobbling. This is not so fun as it may sound.

Less fun than that is getting to the tire place in Corvallis, having them do my tires, and having my bank account give me insufficient funds errors. Because, of course, I had enough money to soak a $300 tire replacement on all my tires, but not do that AND buy plane tickets to PA. So I got to do the credit thing. Oh joy of joys.

Whereupon I proceeded to get back on 99 and go very very fast. Because I could.

But at least those were the original tires that went. 6 years of service isn't bad.

And then, on a totally different note, we have the weekend. Friday, having dealt with the evils of tire replacement, I immediately got to turn around and go back to Corvallis, because in my wisdom I am now GMing a Battletech RPG campaign at the shop. But I get home, and I see this email, and it's from Tali, essentially saying "So what time are you coming tomorrow?"

We pause. "But the email said the weekend after this one, and besides you got the date for Saturday wrong anyway."

"So I can't type. We know this. You're still coming, right?"

Insert a lengthy night of RPG stuff involving character creation and more pop than has been drunk in quite a while, followed by 6-7 hours of sleep and a drive to Portland. Which I drove at high rates of speed, because I could. And then there was a lot of touring Portland, and a trip to Powell's, which as we all know is just about as big as single bookstores get, and it had many books that I desired, so I purchased these books. Also, there was a lot of getting in Tali's car and saying "Ah, new car smell!" because I like new car smell, and Tali's car is, well, new. And very neat.

And then I drove back down I-5 at high rates of speed, because I could.

Posted by Dwip at April 11, 2005 6:01 PM