Who Knew Hell Was This Cold?

After three and a half years in the frozen north the frequency of new experiences has gradually declined.  I usually have to go looking for them now, where before they seemed to find me with disturbing regularity.  Well, I had one of those new experiences the other day and it just found me.

We came out of school about 4:00 and it was a bitterly cold day.  The temperature was -23 and the windchill made it feel closer to -40.  As we were getting into the nicely warmed up car, Jen said that the tire was flat.  Now, Jen is always thinking the tire is flat, so I didn't put much stock in it.  However, I always go and check and this time it was actually flat.  I said some bad words right then.  I had more bad words to say when I realized I had forgotten my big gloves and only had a pair of small stretchy gloves.  So we begin digging out the spare and the jack out of the trunk.  Of course all of that stuff is stacked and packed in layers of foam containers and under layers of trunk and storage stuff.

The first step was to loosen the lug nuts.  Oh, yeah.  I forgot we had locking wheel lugs.  Well, I'll just sit in the car and read the instructions on how to get those bad boys off.  It turns out there is a special insert to put in your tire iron that fits into the end of the one locking nut on each tire to loosen it.  So, I make my way out into the freezing cold and pick up the tire iron and try to loosen the lug nuts.  Let me tell you that it is hard to get much leverage when you only have a six inch tire iron.  What were the idiots are Subaru thinking?  Well, after much grunting and groaning I finally loosened them and jacked up the car.  That is when I realized the tire wouldn't come off.  I figured I should go inside and warm up since I couldn't really feel my pinky fingers anymore.  After a warm up I went back out and kicked the shit out of the tire to loosen it.  That didn't work, so I got out the user manual for the car in case there was something I didn't know.  Nope.  It was just frozen.  Thankfully, the janitor came outside with a hunk of wood and he proceeded to beet the crap out of the tire until it came off.  We put on the donut and headed for home.

After a long drive home we had to find somewhere that was still open to fix our tire or we would be mooching a ride off someone the next day.  It was about 5:30 when we got into town and most places in FSJ close around 5:00, so were a little bit worried.  The first shop we went to couldn't get us in before they closed but nicely referred us to a shop that was open until 7:00.  We got the tire fixed and it turned out to be a sharp stone from the road.  Considering the amount of gravel on our roads during the winter, it's a wonder it hadn't happened sooner.  On the bright side, it was -32 when we came out from school the next day, so it could have been worse.