This Is How Monday Began

It is o-dark-hundred as I lie in bed slumbering and dreaming. I dream a bully is threatening my brothers. In real life I don’t have brothers. Well, there’s the one, but he does his best to pretend I don’t exist, so I’m not sure he counts. But in my dream I’m trying to defend my dream-brothers so I haul off and kick the bully as hard as I can. Back in real life, my sleeping body mimics my dream body, and I kick out with my right leg just as hard as I can. Unfortunately, a cast-iron, hot-water radiator a foot from my bed stops my foot. My second toe, the one next to my big toe, bears the brunt of the encounter. I am awake instantly. My toe hurts like hell. I’m afraid to even look at it. Hours later it still hurts, and it hurts even worse when I walk. Maybe it’s broken.

This isn’t the first time I’ve hurt myself while dreaming, nor is it the first time I’ve blogged about hurting myself while dreaming. Quoting a blog I posted last December 24:

“In the wee hours of Christmas Eve, I lie in bed, dreaming. In my dream I reach up with my right arm to grasp something. The situation is dire, lives are in danger, and I almost jump off the ground as I reach up over my head. At the same time, my actual right arm mimics my dream arm and my hand hits the headboard forcefully enough to awaken me.”

It’s probably just as well I sleep alone. I hope my sleep-punching and sleep-kicking don’t progress to sleep-driving. “Your Honor, I dreamed I was driving on the Interstate highway when suddenly I woke up and …” That would be bad.

About 10:30 AM I decide to drive to the grocery store. As I’m headed to the door my cell phone rings. It’s a female friend and we have just begun talking when “beep beep beep”, the signal drops out. That happens often when I use my phone inside my house. I can’t call her back because she’s calling from a PBX so the number appearing on my phone isn’t her number. In fact, she doesn’t have a number. I have to wait for her to call me back. A few minutes later my phone tells me I have a voicemail message. The phone never rang; the call went straight to voicemail, and that happens much too often. I play the message: it is my friend, the one my phone just dropped, and she says, “Don’t ever hang up in my face again.” That’s it. End of message.

I’m still intent on going to the store, so I go out to my garage, get in my Jeep, and begin backing out. Something feels wrong. It feels like the parking brake is on. I check: the parking brake is off. Then it hits me. Flat tire. I get out and walk around the car. Sure enough, the right front tire is totally flat. '”How is totally flat different from flat?” you ask. If you let the air out of a tire, it’s flat. If you then drive the car a few feet so that the tire starts coming off the rim, it’s totally flat. But I can’t fix it inside my garage, there’s no room to work, so I back it out.

I scratch my head for a few seconds while my brain formulates a plan. I’ll jack up the Jeep, remove the flat tire, install the spare tire, drive the flat tire to the auto shop two blocks away, get them to fix the flat and install the wheel back on the Jeep, and drive home. Good plan.

I have a hydraulic jack in the garage. I put it under the frame and jack up the front right side of the Jeep. The lug nuts, which were probably tightened with an air-powered impact wrench, are a bear to get off but I manage to do it. I get the wheel off the hub. I get out the spare tire and discover that the Jeep is not jacked high enough to put the inflated spare on the wheel hub. Unfortunately, the jack is at its upper limit. I won’t be driving anywhere. I call the repair shop and ask if they will come to my house and pick up the tire and take it to the shop and fix it. The lady says they can’t. “Insurance reasons,” she says.

“I’m two blocks away. You can’t come by and pick up a tire that is sitting at the curb?”

“Sorry,” she says.

I call my neighbor and ask him if he can take me and my flat tire to the repair shop. He says he can. So we drive to the shop, they fix the tire (nail hole), and we drive back.

But now I can’t get the repaired tire on the wheel hub. It’s the same problem I had with the spare – the Jeep isn’t jacked high enough and the jack is at its limit. But I can’t move the jack to a better location because there’s no wheel on that corner of the vehicle; the jack has to stay where it is.

I have another jack in the Jeep. It’s the jack that came with the Jeep. It’s shaped like a bottle jack but I don’t think it’s hydraulic. I don’t know how it works. It says “Patent Pending” on its side, so I suppose it’s some clever mechanical device. I put it under (I’m going to get technical here) the thingy that the wheel hub is attached to and I insert the long crank-rod and begin cranking the jack up. It lifts the wheel hub higher. I put the repaired tire back on the hub, and I install and tighten the lug nuts. The next step is to lower and remove the bottle jack so that the wheel is on the ground, then lower the hydraulic jack. But: slight problem. I can’t lower the bottle jack because the newly installed tire is in the way. Change of plans: I lower the hydraulic jack, move it to the front of the Jeep, put a piece of 2x4 board between it and the Jeep to give me a wee bit more height, and I jack up the vehicle high enough to remove the bottle jack. Then I lower the hydraulic jack. Two hours after I started, the Jeep has four wheels on the ground once again. Throughout this ordeal, the humidity has been at 90% and I’m sweating like the proverbial pig. I waste no time hitting the shower.

So how was your Monday morning?