Well at the last minute (Last Night) my mom called to say my sister just got in from Charlotte where she has been away on business. Finding out that Amy was actually going to be home this year for Thanksgiving My sister didn’t want to just cancel and reschedule thanksgiving like we had planned. She decided she wanted to drive down here and take us out to a buffet dinner for the holiday since it’s rare that Amy is home on a holiday….so we made the plan to go out, everyone got in to bed a bit early. My son wakes me up saying he was sick to stomach. Because he has some serious social anxiety problems and rarely leaves the house we considered nerves, gave him some belly stuff and waited a bit…still sick and had evidence to prove it. So..we arranged for someone to be here with him and Amy and I would go out to dinner with everyone. Don’t worry…I wasn’t leaving a young child.  My oldest son is a handicapped adult and with another adult nearby to help out he’s perfectly okay to be left with a minor ailment…just didn’t want anyone reading this to think I was leaving a sick little one at home.

We knew we needed some slime/fix-a-flat because Amy came home from work saying the tire was bad.  ThenI told her that sucks because my sister was coming down to take us out to dinner.  So in the middle of the night we call my sis who was going to bring us some slime tire sealant when she came down.  Amy goes out the truck to get something before taking her shower and the tire was flat, flat…on the rim and you can’t use slime that way cuz there is no way to pump the tire. 

 

So…we consider popping off the tire, having my sis come down, we will slime the tire, pump it up at Amy’s gas station, bring it back pop it on the truck, check on the kid, if he can’t go we will go on to dinner. 

Well….. 

All we had was an old bottle jack for a car we used to have and a scissor jack that goes to the lumina that isn’t running anymore…no clue what is wrong with the Lumina this time.  Anyhow we tried the bottle jack and had to put it so far under the truck to hit a flat point that we had to use my crutch to jack it up…it wouldn’t go high enough!  Crutch however worked quite well as an emergency jacking tool.

We tried the scissor jack and the truck fell off the jack twice because of the angle we had to get the jack because in this case the jack was too big to fit under the only area that would work as this jack has a lip that is suppose to go into a slot on the Lumina.  The truck has no such slot so we had to find a piece of solid looking metal where the lip would overshoot and not leave an unlevel jacking surface.

So since the scissor is too tall


 

We Get Amy and the Neighbor kid (my youngest son is with my mom and sister 2 hours away) to each use a jack. We will raise the truck high enough with the bottle jack to get the scissor in a better position and hopefully finally jack the truck up. 

Almost there…bottle jack raises the truck, scissor goes in, cranking it up…the side support we used isn’t strong enough it bends and drops the truck, gotta bottle jack it up to get the scissor jack unstuck and out of there 

DEFEAT! We don’t have a truck jack because the truck didn’t come with one and we haven’t been able to afford a replacement jack.  The truck is grounded till we can find someone with a truck jack to come up here and get the !@#$% Tire off….so we ate oatmeal for thanksgiving dinner cuz yeah we are at the end of the month and out of food and we were thankful that nobody got their head crushed under the truck when it dropped that last time. 

Joey…my sons friend learned a valuable lesson in how NOT to jack up a truck. Of course we knew this was dangerous, but when you rarely have the right equipment for a job you do what you gotta do and you hope to come out of it with life and limb intact.  Nothing new for us but hell I felt like venting today cuz I really wanted something better than oatmeal!

So now THIS tire which is not the previously slimed tire that blew back in September while hauling floor repair lumber, no this will be my newest tire running on slime hoping to make it till income tax time so we can buy 4 used tires. 

How as your thanksgiving??

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