#5 Difficulties and Learning

Flat tire. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

Today I am going to try to be grateful for the difficulties in life.

 

Perfect example happened this morning.  We had the car checked yesterday to be sure it would be ready for a road trip over Thanksgiving.  It had been running rough and we needed to find the problem before we left.  We found a “bubble” in one of the tires that was about ready to blow.  Cash being a little low, my husband put the spare on and decided that would work for now.  He then ran off to an appointment.  He didn’t even make it there before the spare tire decided to blow.  He had not bothered to put the bad tire back in the car so he can’t do anything about being stranded on the side of the road.  Here is where the gratitude comes in.  Driving older cars, and previous difficulties have taught us to always carry towing and roadside assistance.  At least we knew enough to be somewhat prepared for this problem.   It would be miserable to not be able to learn from past problems.  And I guess I should be grateful that it blew out before we headed out on the road.

 

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.  May your holiday plans be blow-out free.

 

Related articles

• Reinventing The Wheel (harpersvalley.wordpress.com)
• Top quick flat tire fixes to get you on your way (kfor.com)
• Quick Safety Check Tip: Check the air in your spare tire (eimportsblog.com)
• Gratitude Isn’t Always Easy For Me: My Top 5 List (swimintheadultpool.com)
• Gratitude (dorthahisedevelops.wordpress.com)

 

More Car stuff

Keeping used cars running takes a little money, and a lot of luck.  It also takes more knowledge and experience than I have, so this next post is probably more about saving me from my own ignorance than anything else.

We have an extra car sitting in our garage.  I personally see no need to have more cars than drivers, but we held on to it because it was paid for and we will have extra drivers home for the summer, and a new driver a few months after that.  It had been running really rough and not always shifting properly, but it would be good one day, bad the next.  Then the silly alarm system kept going off at all hours, so we finally just disconnected the battery.  Since then it has been sitting, gathering dust, with a flat tire as a bonus.  What a waste of garage space I thought.

Decided it was time to see if it would run again or not – basically registration is coming up.  Hubby pulled the tire, found a large nail, and got that fixed.  Then he pulled out the battery that was no longer holding the charge, found it well past its life expectancy, and replaced it.  For the price of a flat repair and new battery I feel like we have a new vehicle!  We still need to test it out further, but it looks like the bad battery was probably the cause of all the sporadic issues we were having.  Go figure.