flat tire

Well, this sucked

/ Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

It’s been a rather rough day, all around, in different ways.

After I had to stop mowing to take a rest break, I started heading out to go to the post office, and then to town to pick up my husband’s insulin.

I found this.

One of my tires was completely flat.

Thankfully, we have a full size, brand new, spare tire.

Thankfully, we have CAA!

So I phoned CAA, rather than trying to use the app or their website. With reason. I gave our address and, of course, it didn’t show up, because according to the online maps, we don’t exist. Which meant she had to fight with her system to get it to accept the address given, plus the directions to find us. This was all done by maybe 2:30. She then gave me a time of arrival of 4:25.

!!!

If it was going to take that long, by the time the tire was changed, the placed I needed to go to would be closed!

From past experience, though, I found they would get to use much quicker, so I gave the phone to my husband, then went back out to unlock the gate, then go back to the truck.

I had no clue how to get the spare tire.

After going through the owners manual, I found where the jack, which comes with tire blocks, and tools were stored. We keep the back seats up, but even so, we never saw the parts and pieces! Then I found where the tire was to be lowered from, which had a lock on it. The only key for the truck is the ignition key, and I was quite happy to find it fit the lock.

By the time the guy got to our place, I had all the lock out and the tools on the cover of the box, so he could get right at lowering the spare tire. Which was absolutely covered in gravel road dust!

Then he set to using his own much better jack to lift the truck and start changing the tire. He had a cordless driver, but the lug nuts turned out to be over tightened. That would have been Canadian Tire. When I had the oil changed, the package included a tire rotation. Which means they used an impact driver rather than a torque wrench to put the tires back on, and over did it. He had to fight with it to get them loose enough that he could finish up using his driver. Things were rusty, and no… oh, I can’t remember the name of it now…. something that keeps them from seizing… I’ll probably remember later. It wasn’t used. Later, before putting the lug nuts back on, he knocked the lug nuts against a hard surface, and I could see the rust falling out. He also showed me how the covered on the lug nuts, which are basically decorative, were starting to crack from being over tightened. Something to get taken care of before the become loose and start spinning, instead of turning the lug nuts and damaging them!

The tire was replaced in excellent time, and I was still going to be able to go to town. So I got in and started the engine…

Only to get a warning that the tire that just got changed was low on air.

Okay. It’s been sitting unused for about a year, so that’s not too surprising. It didn’t seem very low on my gauge when I pumped it up, but I guess it was low enough to trigger the sensor.

Then I started the truck again…

… and got the same warning, for the same tire I just topped up.

Which tells me the spare tire doesn’t have a sensor, so the computer has noting to read and gives this automatic response.

I’ll just have to ignore it for now.

I headed out and first stopped at the post office to pick up a parcel, then kept going to town. The CAA guy had put the flat tire into the box of the truck for me – we both looked it over but could see no obvious cause for it to be flat. My first stop was at the garage. The owner happened to walk outside just as I got there, so we chatted for a bit, and I told him about the tire. My guess is, I ran over something when I did the dump run on Tuesday. As soon as I said I’d done a dump run, he basically said the same thing.

He’ll take a look at it and text me when it’s done. Hopefully, it’ll just need a patch, and not replacement. If all goes well, I’ll be able to book an appointment to have it put back, and the spare returned where it belongs, before I head in to the city to do our stock up shopping.

Once that was dropped off, I made the pharmacy run and took advantage of the trip to run a few more errands. While I did that, my daughter was busy at home and got another 18′ log for me. We just need to get it dragged out of the spruce grove. I now have enough to frame out one of the prepared beds in the main garden.

Then it was time to head home and unload the truck, have a very late lunch, then head back outside to continue mowing.

It was while I was doing that, when I got a video call from an old friend from high school. It was only last night that I saw her share something on Facebook that absolutely stunned me, about another friend from high school. She had passed away a few days ago, but I’d heard nothing about it until then. So she called me and we talked for quite a while. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to go to the funeral. Not only is it two provinces away, but it’s on a date we’ve already made arrangements to connect with a friend that’s back in Canada from South America. I was updated on the circumstances, which made the whole thing even more shocking. Basically, the hospital killed her, by assuming treatment before doing a CT scan. Which is something that I’ve seen happen – or almost happen – way too many times. My husband is very lucky to still be with us right now, since they almost killed him three times when he developed his heart condition, as just one example.

So we’re all kind of reeling about the circumstances.

It does make you think how important it is to stay connected to the people you care about. To not put off that phone call, or that email, or that visit. Any one of us can be gone in an eye blink, regardless of our age or health or whatever.

As much as I love that we live out in the boonies and don’t have to deal with so many people all the time, it does make it harder to stay connected with the people I want to stay connected with!

Anyhow. That’s the biggest reason this day was on the rough side.

Things still need to be done, though, so after the call, I finished mowing the section of yard I was working on. The inner yard is now half done (not counting the garden area). Unfortunately, the forecast now says we’ll be getting rain starting in the wee hours of the morning, and continuing on through to Saturday morning. We’re still getting heavy rainfall warnings from the weather services. Overnight temperatures are also expected to drop, with a low of 2C/36F on Saturday night, which makes frost a possibility. The cooler overnight temperatures will just give us more time to get those low raised beds cleaned up and shifted over, and ready for planting after we pass our last frost date in June – and get the rest of the lawn mowed before it turns into hay!

We’ll see how it works out. I’m certainly not going to complain about getting rain.

The Re-Farmer

Well, now

/ Re-Farmer / 10 Comments

So this lends weight to the “defective tire” theory.

I checked the trail cam files from yesterday. With the one camera, there just isn’t a view of that tire, but with the other…

I cropped this from a screen cap of the video. It’s the best I could get.

Even taking into account that the tire is sunk in mud, it looks really low!

The last time the car was used was then I took my mother grocery shopping about a week ago. It has been sitting in the garage every since. The only reason I took it out at all is because my sister helped my mother with grocery shopping, so I wanted to make sure the car got some time on the road.

I’ve just taken it out and checked the rest of the tires as much as I can. I’ll be asking the mechanic to give them a quick inspection once he has it up on the lift.

I was telling my brother and his wife about what happened, and they had the same immediate thoughts I did; could it have been deliberate? In their case, they actually know someone who had … issues… with someone else, and that person vandalized the inside of their tires. All four of them!

I don’t think our vandal did anything, though. Not just because it would be physically difficult; where the car is parked is so cramped, there is no way anyone of his size and lack of mobility could have gotten to that tire. Plus, he wouldn’t have been that subtle. If he was going to damage our tires, he would have just slashed our tires. So I don’t think this is the result of an act of vandalism.

It should be interesting to hear what the mechanic has to say when he finally sees the tire this afternoon!

The Re-Farmer

This is why.

/ Re-Farmer / 5 Comments

You see this?

This is why I’m paranoid about tires.

Actually, I’m paranoid about vehicle break downs and troubles in general, but especially about tires.

My mother’s car got all new tires after we didn’t hit a deer, a couple of winters ago, and drove through a ditch, instead. With how infrequently my mother’s car is used, they are still in very new condition. In fact, the coloured markings on them haven’t worn off yet!

I have no idea what I could have hit that caused this! I hadn’t reached even 5 miles from home when it blew.

This is my best guess.

Every winter, as the snows melt off the gravel roads, the surface gravel is mostly gone, and a lot of rocks start protruding. These tend to be very rounded rocks, not angular ones, but sometimes they end up sticking out quite far. Because of the direction I was going, I took a different route to get to the highway. It added an extra mile of gravel road, and the final two miles are a smaller road than the one we usually take to get to the highway. (This route has the added bonus of us not having to drive past our vandal’s place.) It was a rough ride, and though I drove slower and tried to avoid the rocks, I did hit some. My mother’s car is very light in the back, so I was feeling every bump more than with our van, as it was.

However, it was about a mile and a half on the highway when it happened, and there was nothing on the highway for me to hit. I just suddenly started hearing the noise in the back, and immediately pulled over. I didn’t even feel anything different in how the car handled. At least, not with how quickly I pulled over.

After quickly messaging the family to let them know what happened, I called up CAA to get a tire change. I then spent the next 10-15 minutes, trying to explain to the person I was talking to, where I was. CAA, of course, wants an address. I had none. There was nothing but trees around me. I finally got out to see if what may have been a driveway up ahead had a marker number (I couldn’t actually see one, and they are supposed to be highly visible, which means the driveway was likely to an unoccupied piece of land). As I got out, I was able to see there was actually a road behind me. It took a couple of minutes to walk close enough to be able to read the road number.

The poor woman on the phone just could not find me. She couldn’t find our little hamlet. She couldn’t find the provincial route number it’s on. She was using Google Maps, so I tried giving her the names of larger towns in the area. Every now and then, she’s say, “near [suburb near the city, an hour’s drive away]?” or “near [small town I know the name of, couldn’t tell anyone where it us, other than “somewhere north of us”]?” The road number I gave her did not come up for her at all, as if it didn’t exist.

I swear, it was like trying to explain to a delivery company, how to find the farm!

Eventually, she had enough information to give to a driver and told me it would take about an hour for them to arrive.

An hour???

That done, I messaged my family, asking someone to come with the van. My younger daughter has her license, but with all the crap going on right now, she has not been able to book the 2 hours of driver’s training she needs to do, before she can take her a road test for her full license. Which meant my husband had to accompany her for the drive.

My husband, who has been having extremely bad pain days for the past couple of weeks.

My husband, whose walker is now kept in the sun room, where it is easier for him to get in and out through the doors. Where Ginger is camped out right now.

He didn’t even bring a cane! Not that it mattered. We keep several canes in the van, and there’s at least one in my mother’s car. We collect canes! :-D

While I was waiting, I got a call from the driver, much sooner than expected. He asked some more questions about where I was. Since he’s actually from the area, I could tell him some land marks (you know that radio tower? I’m looking at it right now.) that he knew. He arrived not long after my husband and daughter did.

I would really like to invest in the tools he had! Especially the jack. The tire was changed in almost no time at all. The little jack that came with the car would have taken three times as long, just to lift the car.

Once he had the tire off, we could see the damage, and I was just amazed!! I was half expecting to see a piece of glass or something (I’d seen some on the shoulder as I walked to read the road sign for CAA).

My daughter and I were talking about how these were quite new tires, so wear and tear can’t be blamed. He took a closer look and said he thought the tire might have been defective.

The spare tire is the little donut, not a full size tire, so I drove home at almost half speed, with the flashers on, with my husband and daughter following behind.

Because at this point, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the spare tire went flat or something. :-/

Once we got home, I still wanted to run my errands, but I decided to go to town, rather than the small city I was originally planning to. That allowed me to swing by the garage and talk about bringing my mother’s car in.

I’m bringing it in tomorrow afternoon.

*sigh*

First the cat, now my mother’s car? What more can go wrong?

Never mind. I don’t want to know. The list would be too long! :-D

The Re-Farmer

Really?!?!?

/ Re-Farmer / 10 Comments

I took my mother’s car out to run some errands. This just happened.

I am now on the side of the road, waiting for CAA.

It was very difficult to explain to the person how to find me. She couldn’t even find out little hamlet on Google maps.

I have no idea what I hit to cause a flat.

*sigh*

The Re-Farmer

What. A. Day.

/ Re-Farmer / 1 Comment

So… things did not turn out as planned, today.

Not by a long shot!!

The plan for the day was, go into town and drop the cats off to get snipped when the vet opened at 9am, then head to the town our garage is in to start the process of getting winter tires through the insurance company’s loan program, then head home until it was time to pick the cats up at 4.

The first hitch in our plans happened before we even left.

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