My daughter and son in-law have had some car trouble with one of their cars recently.  I work out of my home and don't have a lot of need for my car, so I loaned them mine to use until theirs was fixed.  My daughter enjoyed being able to get around and take her 3 children to school.  My car is nothing special.  It's a '94 Taurus with the paint peeling off the front.  I guess I've had it about 6 years now.  I like the shape of a Taurus.  It has alloy wheels that make it look nice.  I'm not much of a car enthusiast.  Most important to me is; will it get me where I want to go.  This car has always done that. 

Last week I "borrowed" my car back from my daughter to go to lunch with some friends.  I picked up a friend and we went to lunch about 30 minutes away.  After lunch I dropped him off at his office and headed home.  I was almost home when my right front tire went completely flat.  The weather was really nasty.  The snow we had had on the ground for a month was starting to melt and it was very slushy.  I was only about a block from home and thought I would just drive it home flat and fix it in my dry garage. The tires were old and probably need to be replaced anyway so I felt the cost of destroying the tire was minimal.  I was hoping not to hurt the rim.  I got home fine and pulled into the garage where I saw that the steel belt was sticking thru the side of the tire.  I don't know if that happened while driving it flat, or that is what caused the flat in the first place.  I was going to have to buy some tires.  I just needed to put the spare on and drive it to get some tires.  After unloading the trunk of all the stuff I store there, golf clubs, golf shoes, a fishing pole, network cable, phone wire and misc. junk I tried to get the spare and jack out.  This is where the fun begins.  The tire is held in with a plastic wing nut.  That wing nut broke and left me with a small square metal nut with sharp edges to take off.  It was too tight to get off with bare hands.  Luckily I was in my garage and I could walk over and get a wrench from the tool box and have it off in a jiffy.  I don't think I would have been able to get the spare out without the wrench.  I got the funny little donut spare out.  Under it was the jack.  I wasn't going to use the jack because I have a nice hydraulic floor jack.  But I noticed there wasn't a lug wrench.  I never could have gotten the tire changed on the road with out the wrench.  I really didn't need it since I was in my garage and I have air tools that make this job easy.  I did have to resort to a 3 foot piece of pipe to extend my breaker bar to get the lug nuts off.  I don't think a standard lug wrench would have worked if I had one.  So now I'm rolling (I thought).  I put the donut spare on the lugs and start to put on one of the lug nuts.  These are fancy lug nuts that look like bolts on the outside.  Since the spare a steel wheel, the nuts must thread down further on the lugs than they do on the alloy wheels.  They can't go down far enough on these wheels.  Because they are these fancy ones.  So the wheel will just wobble around even if the nuts are a far as they can go.  Now I understand that there are multiple reasons why changing this tire would have been impossible to do outside of a garage.  I start to think back on some of the places I have driven that car.  I have been out in the middle of Montana, Nevada, and Idaho.  I have been far from garages.  Then I think of my Daughter with 3 kids in the car, its 10 degrees out side!.  God was certainly looking out for us.  It was great to have a flat tire that I could change in my garage.  I had to go to the store and buy lug nuts and a lug wrench.  Then I got to go get my Christmas tires. 

Merry Christmas.