Category: Life

While driving to Mankato today to get away from the rainy gloom of the day and to pick up a few things, we hit something with our driver-side-rear tire. I didn’t think much of it until I walked past it to get my son out of his car seat. It was at that time that I heard the distinctive hiss of a deflating tire. Yes!

Laura watched Jamis while I began the process of removing the now useless tire and replacing it with our low-speed spare that I knew was attached to the undercarriage of the van.

Funny thing is that we just had the tires rotated and we took a different way into Mankato. If we had stuck to our normal path, probably wouldn’t have blown a tire. Oh well, that’s life.

Back to the story. I had never had to change a tire under these conditions before, mainly because I lived on a farm for most of my life and it meant that we had heavy jacks, air compressors and ample vehicles to tow back and forth with. Find a great towing company with this Canadian Towing article if you find yourself in a situation like this. Regardless, I got to work confident that I could work it out. Luckily, Ford supplied the needed tools and instructions on what to do. That wasn’t the hard part.

The hard part was getting the spare tire off of the cables which attached it to the undercarriage. Basically, the spare had never been used before (a good thing) and had rusted to the cables (a bad thing). It took longer for me to pry the cables off than it did to jack up the car, take off the bad tire, attach the new tire and clean up.

That stunk.

Moral of the story? Spend some time learning about how your vehicle works when replacing a bad tire. Find where the tools are hidden, how the spare is attached, how you are supposed to store the bad tire when moving and everything else. Also, take the time to remove the spare and reattach it as well. Not only will this give you some practice so that it will be easier when you need to do it, but you will also make sure that your cables are not rusting tight so that you don’t need to pry the cables apart when you need it.

I guess I could have tossed a “protip” in there somewhere.

Tomorrow morning will hopefully mark four weeks since I started running consistently again. It was a long time coming, but it has been good for me to get back out there and put my feet to concrete three mornings a week.

It has not been easy and I still feel some muscles ache the day after, but I feel a little better now than I have for a while (physically), and the weather is finally turning around so that I don’t feel like I need to defrost myself when I get back inside.

I’m still aiming to run a 5K in July of this year and then we will see what my next goal is.

“You’re here for a reason. We want a well-rounded class; NOT a well-rounded student.” – Rab Thornton, New College Admissions Director (1986)

This came over Twitter today from Merlin Mann, and I thought it rather strange at first. It took me a moment to wrap my head around what might be in those words, but I think I found it after a while.

We are living in an age where “well-rounded” is the ideal for every person. We want to eat a well-rounded meal, receive a well-rounded education and all-in-all just become a well-rounded individual.

Maybe we are setting the bar too low by striving to be well-rounded. Maybe being oblong or slightly ragged makes for a more interesting person. If you get a bunch of non-round people together, maybe they can complement each other and do something great.

That’s what I hope.