Holy Cow. What a Day.
Got another 11" of snow during the night. What a joy to wake up to. On the good side, technically I got my workout in for the day while shoveling the driveway (the plowridge, actually). The hard part wasn't the shoveling itself, it was throwing the snow up onto the 4-5 foot pile already there from the previous storms.
Cue segue to a peeve of mine -- snow plows that push the snow from the driveway being cleared back into the road. On the way home tonight, I encountered a large clump of what I thought was snow and ice, and though I tried to swerve to avoid it, ended up hitting it dead on. There was a sound like a bullet being fired , and my front passenger tire suddenly went flat from an explosive blowout. I took refuge in an empty driveway, and tried to change the tire by myself, but was unable to pull the old one off the wheel.
Fine. I have AAA for emergencies like this, and after a brief call, I was assured that someone would be there within 30 minutes. Meanwhile, I'm blocking the snow-crowded driveway of a complete stranger, car up on the jack, with the lugnuts completely removed. Immobile, and I'm not comfortable sitting in the car while it's up on the jack. Brrrr.... Cold, cold, cold.
Thirty minutes later, and I get a call telling me that help will be there in another thiry minutes. And then, the owner of the house is in the street, unable to pull into his driveway, wanting to know what I'm doing there. So, I throw the lugnuts back in, lower the jack, and pull further into a cleared spot in front of his house. Turns out he was very kind and helpful once he learned the situation. However, once the AAA guy arrived and put my spare on, we learn that the spare needs a smaller size of lugnuts, and they should have been in with the spare tire, but were nowhere to be found.... Damn you, Mercedes Benz.
Long story short, my car got towed to a tire shop, and the kind stranger let me wait in his warm house until my husband showed up to get me. (The kids loved going for a ride in their pajamas!)
Turns out the loud noise I heard was whatever-I-ran-over actually punching a 1-inch hole in the rim itself.