hell week (seriously)

my week leading up to xmas was anything but pleasant…

…except tuesday. tuesday was pretty nice.

monday my tire pressure monitors started acting a fool. throwing errors i’ve never seen. i thought one had gone out, but it was acting like it was the whole system, then one, then the whole system. very annoying. who knew i needed to count my blessings on that shit?

like i said, tuesday was nice, at least as i recall. in the “no news is good news” kinda way.

wednesday i was trying to be the good husband. needed to fix an oil leak in the ufc’s x1, which necessitated an oil change, and for good measure i was gonna swap out her headlights to LED’s as that was part of her xmas stuff from me. all went well till the headlights, which had a very small opening to get in and nothing fit quite right. i’ve always sworn i would “never own a japanese car because to work on them you need little japanese hands” but apparently german hands are smaller than i gave them credit for because that sucked. as i’m typing this (a few days later) my hands are still feeling it.

thursday was a motherfucker. that’s when an arctic front blew in. at 11:30am i was exiting for the shop and it was 60°, making me comment to myself that i regretted the long sleeved nine inch nails t-shirt i was wearing. at just before noon i was leaving the shop to head to another one, and it was already down to 50°. a couple blocks up i decided the overcast chilliness required comfort food, so i made a last minute right turn to hit SLAB, a hip-hop themed bbq joint for the daddy mac, which has been on my instagram before…

but when i made the turn, i clocked a pothole that was serious enough that when i walked back out of slab about a half hour later, my tire looked flat. i checked it and it was 4psi. i hooked up my air compressor to it, but it would only get it to 14psi, then nothing, and the second i unhooked it the hiss was undeniable, so i pulled out of a front space so i wasn’t in the front row for a couple hours, and pulled out into the parking lot. by now we were at 45°.

i called my boss, who i knew owned a couple nice hydraulic jacks, but they were all at his detailing business several miles away, so he borrowed one from his neighbor and met me. it took less than two seconds after we pulled the wheel to see the dent in the inner part of the rim, making it to where the bead wouldn’t sit and hold air, so he whisked it off to his wheel guy while my car sat on the jack, but the same day fix was not to be. i headed back in to the bbq joint to call the ufc, and get out of the now 39° cold as i was wearing a long sleeve shirt and SHORTS because i did legs in the gym that morning.

a couple hours later the ufc showed up with my spare in the back of her x1, and i got it inflated and put on. i hopped in the car, started it up, instantly turned on the heated seats, and fended off the TPMS warning that i’m still dealing with as of this writing (xmas day). and at that point? 24°

(it should be noted that all indications from all weather sources were that the front wouldn’t hit till well after i’d be back at the house, but sometimes texas is gonna texas)

friday, after a really stiff cold front with vicious arctic winds, seemed to be starting okay until the ufc went to take a shower and we had no hot water. but all toilets flushed. water pressure seemed good. and i had hot water in the kitchen, but it turns out those pipes are all in the slab, where as the hot water for the shower runs through the attic and the pipes aren’t wrapped. so even though THIS weather didn’t freeze em…

this front did. so i end up having to duck walk the length of the house with a hair dryer in my sub-freezing attic to no avail trying to thaw shit. took a tepid shower later, but running hot water through them had all good by the time the ufc finally took her shower later that night, and no return of the problem since, so finally things started to look up, except for none of us really making money on xmas weekend at the shop. but the nice things about weeks like this? they, at some point, fucking end.