Brooke Writes Books... and Other Musings...

Today I got something crossed off the proverbial To Do List…and it wasn’t even officially on there! Woo hoo!

About noon, I innocently go out to my car to go to lunch. A rather mundane, ordinary thing. Nothing too exciting about that… And notice that the back tire is lookin’ mighty darn low. Drats! (and yes, you are right…this is not quite the word I used…)

Now you have to understand…I have this thing about checking my tires…all the time…Ready for another: when I was a little girl story? Tough! When I was a little girl, waiting for the school bus in Palo Alto, every morning we would watch the guy across street as he performed his morning car check before going to work. He would come out in his shirtsleeves and place his jacket and briefcase on the back seat of the car. Next, he’d climb behind the steering wheel and start the engine. Get back out of the car, go to the rear tire and look at it a second. Then he’d bend down and stare at it, stand up and kick it, and proceed around the back of the car to the other tire. Perform the same check. Move to the front tire. Glower, bend, peer, rise, kick. Finally tire number four’s turn… Then he’d get in and drive away.

Being an impressionable pre-teen, this stuck in my mind…Oh whatever…I check my tires regularly…not that religiously…none of that bending, peering, kicking nonsense, but I do keep an eye on them, always thinking about Eileen K’s dad and glad I am not as obsessive as he! But getting a flat on the freeway or at some other inconvenient time (and any time a tire goes flat is inconvenient in my book!) is not my idea of fun…

So…anyway! The tire was fine yesterday…it was not fine today. Double drats. What to do…what to do… Well, the first thing to do was to ask one of the machinists if he’d kindly put some air in it so I could get to either Costco (where I can have it fixed for free…) or to dealer where I could also get the oil changed, the tires rotated, the 30K check done at the same time…all things I’d been putting off cuz one cannot take a disgracefully dirty car to the dealer… I opted to suck it up and took my poor dirty baby to the dealer.

A few hours later, I picked him up again…the most expensive tire repair in the world! But hey! They threw in an oil change, lube, tire rotation, 30K check and a CAR WASH! My lucky day!

And tomorrow morning…I no longer have to think: hmmm…I really need to get you washed, baby, so we can go to the dealer and not feel like shmucks. Ah…life is good…