I spent the afternoon looking out my office window admiring all the pretty snow that was falling outside. There is something about watching a good snowfall that puts everything at peace. Everything gets this nice, white coating, people are bustling around all bundled in coats and scarves…it’s just a beautiful sign of winter that as a Floridian I never got to appreciate until I moved up north.
Then there was tonight’s drive home.
My car…Snowflake (because those that know me know that I give a name to everything)
I love her. I picked her out from a lot of thousands and she’s never failed me. She’s a mini mini van…the wanna-be soccer mom’s car. I love that I can luge my tribe of people around and everyone fits comfortably. The issue with Snowflake…which Mike insists he pointed out from the time we signed on the dotted line…is that she sports high performance tires. To me, a tire is a tire is a tire. Evidently, not so much. These tires are not snow tires, they’re not even get a little wet in the rain tires. They are not hug the payment tires, they are skid around like a fanning fishtail out of water, freak out at the slightest puddle tires.
Wait! There’s more. Mike’s been nagging me for months…like 5 months…that we should get new tires on Snowflakes because the ones that we have on her now are just barely passing inspection. So, you guessed it…not only do I have no-snow tires, I have no-snow tires that are bald and unsafe. But do I buy new tires? Uh…no. Because really, spending $600 on tires is just ridiculous. Do you know how many other much needed things I could buy with $600? It’s 1/2 way to a new lens that I’ve been drooling over, it’s plane tickets to Florida that I need to buy, it’s marketing material and sample albums and Starbucks Vanilla Lattes and CAKE! $600 is alot of money to drop on a set of tires and up until tonight I have been dead set against even the thought of buying them.
So…here I was…going up the road two blocks from home, at night, in the snow, with bald, high preformance tires. Do you see where I’m going with this?! I’ll tell you where I’m going with this…BACKWARDS and SIDEWAYS! And, being the Floridian that I am, I panic (just a little) and press on the brakes. And now I’m stuck. If I let go of the brakes I’m really going to slide down the inclined road backwards. I call Mike.
“Um…dude! I can’t make it home!”
“What?! Why?!”
And I explain. Just then two guys see that I’m sideways in the middle of the road with my blinkers on and approach the totally Cuban, hysterical wife, yelling at her husband, “What do I do?!” I hang up with Mike and the guys offer to help. Great! Now I’m one of those moran women that can’t drive in the snow. I explain and show them the problem. The one guy says, “hey! But those are really nice high performance tires!” Really…are you kidding me?! I sheepishly giggle and mutter, “yeah, aren’t they sweet?! I’m soooo never going to hear the end of this when I get home!”
Long story short…they salt under my tires and push me up the road until my tires grip. The rest of the .4 of a mile that I had to drive was brutal and I totally white knuckled it up the road. And as I get ready to cross the street to my house, I see Mike and Nico…shoveling out Mike’s car from the parking lot ready to come and rescue me.
Mike…grinning from ear to ear says, “I love you!” All cynical and smirky as if to say, “how’d you like some new tires now?!” UGH!
I see no 16-35mm lens in my future, rather a nice, non-sporty set of tires. And let me tell you, them suckers better hug the road as if it were its B.F.F.!
And so to end the evening recap on a pretty note…I went outside after dinner and snapped some shots of our street and our house…showing that while a nice white coating is really pretty…it really is a P.I.T.A. in disguise!
