The Wife is helping with assembly and breakfast this week at The Boy’s school, so everyone left before me this morning.
I left a little late because I was futzing around with our Internet connection. I haven’t been able to get BoingBoing from home since they changed servers back in early October. Time Warner seems to be having problems with updating their DNS servers as I have no problem accessing it from work and other locations. They still point to the old IP address. I spent about an hour with their tech support last night and they eventually elevated the problem to a "network specialist" as they couldn’t solve it. I’m supposed to hear something back from him/her today. Part of the troubleshooting involved disconnecting our router and connecting my PC directly to the cable modem. When I put everything back last night, I didn’t check the connection and the router apparently wasn’t getting an IP address for some reason. I restarted both the modem and the router before leaving this morning and everything seems to be back to normal.
I got a call from The Wife about 10 minutes after I left the house, she had apparently come back out to her car after helping with breakfast to find her back left tire completely flat. Since she had LaLa, she needed help dealing with it. I changed directions and headed for the school. Those of you keeping track will remember that we’ve replaced at least 3 of the 4 tires on the car in the past 18 months and dealt with at least two flat tires on this car in the same period. Upon arriving, I tried getting the spare tire out of her car, but had trouble unscrewing the bolt that holds it in place. I eventually got it to loosen up only to find that the nut holding it in place had come loose and was now turning freely with the bolt. Since the nut is basically inaccessible inside the body of the car, there’s no way to keep it from turning with the bolt. The spare tire wasn’t coming out without a set of bolt cutters. I decided to use my spare tire instead. The next hurdle was to find the key for the wheel lock. The tires on The Wife’s car have one nut that requires a special attachment to unscrew it. We’ve been careful in the past to keep track of it since you can’t remove a tire without it. Of course, it wasn’t in any of the usual places. The Wife and I are competing for who has the most cluttered car and she’s clearly in the lead, making a search for something a little larger than an average plastic bottlecap all the more difficult. I finally found it floating around in her trunk after spending 10 or 15 minutes searching my own car for my wheel lock, eventually realizing that I don’t have one as my tires just use regular nuts. I finally got the spare installed and put flat tire, which turned out to have a fairly large nail in it, in her trunk. Luckily, I bought the road hazard insurance from NTB on all of her tires, so this shouldn’t cost us anything when she goes to get the tire fixed later today.
Of course to top things off, it just so happens that The Wife had bought a voucher last night for Hillary Clinton’s book. She’s in town this morning signing copies at BookPeople and that’s where The Wife was headed right after her breakfast duties. The little tire escapade made her 1-2 hours late for the signing and I could see as I headed to work that the line was around the building. I also noticed Tiffany Miller in line as I passed by. The last I heard, The Wife was trying to find a parking space and was still planning on getting a signed book. I’m interested to hear how well LaLa holds up standing in line for hours after waiting for us through the tire incident.