A Flat Tire (or - The Most Boring Day Ever)

I don't have pictures for this post, because I didn't think of it until far too late. But I made my first call to CAA today! Then cancelled it because we are just around the corner from Walmart and decided it would be better to drive there on our flat.

It turns out that might have been a bad decision, since 95 Honda Civics use tubeless tires, and we ended up with side-wall damage that left our flat tire irreparable. So Matt put the spare tire on it in the Walmart parking lot and we drove to Canadian Tire since they had all-season tires in stock - Walmart didn't.

At Canadian Tire, I spent the longest hour of my life in the waiting area. I was so bored I wanted to fall down. My body hurt from boredom. Matt and I had wandered the store for a little while, but there is only so much time a broke person with no outdoor hobbies can pass in the aisles of CT. After about 6 minutes I sat on a folding stool that was on sale while Matt looked over cooking sets for backpackers. An African woman wandering by with her friend asked if I worked there, which puzzled me, slouching on that $15 stool in my jean skirt, flip flops and brown hoodie. Maybe Canadian Tire is different in Africa (a little joke).

Having managed to kill maybe 10 minutes, Matt brought me to the waiting area, which I hoped would have ANY kind of diversion. We could see that Blat was still parked where we left it, so there was no end to our waiting in sight. There was however a specialty coffee machine that was out of order, two fake plants, some CT flyers, a car maintenance magazine and a TV.

Since the waiting room was empty, I didn't feel shy to walk up to the TV and change the channel to find something that could move the time along - I was hoping for TLC maybe, or CSI re-runs, even infomercials could have sufficed.

But there was only one channel.

And that channel was playing NASCAR.

I could end the post there - I know for some people the chance to watch a NASCAR race on a Saturday afternoon would be a dream come true. For me, it was the empty shell of an afternoon that had its soul sucked out with a side-wall-damaged, tubeless straw. I actually flipped through the CT flyer AND magazine, reading a whole ad about why do-it-yourself liquid truck bed liner is a great option. And a full-page diagram/flow-chart of how to spend hundreds of dollars on roof racks and cargo accessories.

But the silver lining of this whole extra-boring cloud was that it happened today and not tomorrow, when we will (by God's grace) drive up to Orillia right after church to have Thanksgiving with my family there. And for that reason, I am truly, truly grateful that the tire went flat today.

Not only that, but Matt and I were together through the whole adventure, so we got to spend all that time together, and we got to share a small crisis that didn't end with me in tears. This is the stuff marriage is made of :)

AND we went on a date to the movies tonight, so it wasn't actually the most boring DAY ever, because most of the day was quite great. But that HOUR felt like 700 HOURS. So in that sense, my title stands.