Why There Was No Day Seven in Ukulele Week

Image stolen from Carol Lay

As I threatened to, I spent Saturday listening to a horrible, horrible, soul-killing one-credit seminar. Here is what I learned: if you have problems, they can be solved by showing clips from The Right Stuff, or possibly CNN. Also try to sell your book to students as much as possible. If you get lost in your notes, just read epigrams you've cribbed from inspirational calendars until everyone starts rustling papers, then send them out to lunch.

Then I took a nap. Then I ran into hallmates Dan and Josh and decided to take them to see The Mummy Returns, not based on its technical merits so much as the very real possibility that there would be many decapitations. (I was also hoping I could squint and pretend that the movie was about Nyarlathotep.)

We walked out to the DeathBug 2000. On the way, Dan's sandal suffered a critical malfunction, forcing us to fix it with safety pins lest he be turned away from the theater. This turned out to be an omen: we piled into my car, and I was about to head out onto the road when I realized it was sitting funny.

Now, I'm not the lightest person. Dan is bigger than me, and Josh is built like the Beast Rabban, only not quite so homicidal. At first I thought that we'd just loaded the car funny, but getting out I saw that the passenger rear tire was flat.

Crud. Well, we could still make a later showing. I shooed the fellows out of the car and opened the trunk to get out my spare tire.

Which was also flat, so I decided to delay tire fixin' until daylight. No movie!

We all walked to Wendy's instead, to buy kids' meals for the Men in Black toys inside. (We need as many Men in Black props as possible to continue our program of surprising and annoying Mike, the guy who runs the Men in Black RPG.) Unfortunately, Wendy's was out of the good toys, and we sure didn't need official neon green MiB wallets or kid-sized sunglasses.

On the way back from Wendy's, I found a dollar in the road. Then we stopped at the market and I found the laundry detergent section for Josh. I thought this meant our string of horribly failing at errands was at an end, until we went to the video store and then got kicked out at closing before we could agree on what movie to rent.

So instead of a movie, they helped me generate a BESM character, then I went to bed, as it was 1 AM and the seminar had worn me out. I was not looking forward to the tire situation on Sunday, but it didn't seem like it would be a big deal.

I woke up at the crack of 9, and would have recorded some ukulele, but Spider was asleep. She'd gone to bed a little earlier than I had, and stayed asleep until at least 2, when I finished my quiet puttering and left to face the car.

Figuring it was just low from disuse, I took the spare across campus to the pressurized air hose by the bike racks. Trying to save energy, I tied it to the back of my bike. That was a mistake. The whole mess fell over, and now I need to take my bike in to have the frame re-bent a little. "Now that's something I have to do on Monday!" I said to myself, a bit perturbed.

I reinflated the tire and walked it across campus to my car. The sun was hot and the tire was heavy. I was already getting frustrated with the whole endeavor. That's when I found out my jack didn't work.

Well, after struggling with it on the hot asphalt for about half an hour, I made it work. See, the one little deal that should have sprung back up after I worked the lever didn't spring back up, so I had to follow a different routine than usual:

• insert jack handle
  
• push down handle
  
• remove handle
  
• stick handle into jack mechanism sideways
  
• whack jack mechanism until it clicks
  
• remove handle from mechanism
  
• replace handle to jack
  
• repeat
  

The tire was in the goddamned air, and it was only an hour in! Hooray! I pried the hubcap off with a bent and rusty screwdriver I'd found in the trunk, making it bend even more, and set at the lug nuts.

My god, I know you're supposed to make them tight, seeing how they hold the tire to the car and everything, but the damned things would not come off. I turned and turned and generated as much torque as I could, while little girls with big sunglasses drove their California plates in and out of the parking lot, gum snapping as they looked for spaces. Not that that has anything to do with my story.

I finally realized I was only making myself more angry and unhappy, so I put some more WD-40 on the nuts and left the scorched parking lot for the nearby cafeteria, where I purchased a drink cup and drank a lot of water. Usually, I drink about a liter and a half of water before noon, so being out in the open wasn't just dehydrating me from without, it was keeping me from my drinking habit.

Yeah, I could have brought a water bottle along. I didn't think of that.

It also turned out that my bloodsugar was low, so I refilled my cup with lemonade one of my trips to the spout. These days it seems I can't tell whether my bloodsugar is low, high, or normal and I'm just in an altered state of annoyance. Diabetes is always a fun addition to regular problems!

I eventually returned to my car. Unfortunately, nobody had stolen the tire, even with the tire iron in plain sight and the lug nuts exposed. Dammit. The nuts still weren't moving, the Californians were still circling, and Spider was probably still blissfully asleep, back in the room. It's a wonder more people don't get tire irons embedded in their skulls one way or another; they're really nicely balanced.

Then I remembered something and started stepping on the tire iron with one foot. That didn't work, so I started balancing on it with one foot. No. Then I started hopping with one foot on the left arm of the tire iron.

There was the most horrible noise.

But that lug nut was now loose enough to take off. Hooray! I eventually got them all off, although it took quite a lot of hopping, more than you'd ever expect. I guess level two of Nelda Nockbladder taught me a good lesson.

The tire iron got pretty badly bent, but I didn't strip the nuts. I installed the spare with relative ease, jacked down the car, and took the tire to the tire-fixin' place, where I also inflated the spare a little more than I could with the bike pressure hose.

It was about 5:30. Before I forgot, I drove to Fred Meyer and bought:

• rags for car grease
  
• Liquid Wrench
  
• unbent tire iron, not rusty
  
• unbent sturdy screwdriver, not rusty
  
• Tootsie Rolls!
  

I was covered in grease and dirt marks, mostly on my arms and abdomen. I had gunk on my forehead from pushing my hair out of my eyes. I was covered in dried sweat and beet-red from the sun and the stress. The cashier sized me up and did not make any small talk, only small, birdlike motions as she rung me up quickly.

Then I went back to the parking lot and back to the dorm. Spider and her brother met me on their way out, as I went in to collapse on my bed.

I was all banged up; my arms and wrists hurt, my knuckles were bloody and fingers were swollen from pulling and twisting the tire iron, and my brain felt like it'd been alternately shriveled and rehydrated several times over, both from dehydration and bloodsugar problems.

So I hope you can understand why after I regained consciousness, I opted to get dinner, tape cartoons on Fox and go out to see The Mummy Returns with Meredith rather than record ukulele music for posterity. I need to, then, declare the end of Ukulele Week. I'll still put up the occasional MP3 when I have something good; until then, keep circulating the tapes.

The one good thing that happened this weekend was, however, ukulele-related: I met an honest-to-goodness Hawaiian ukulelist who might be persuaded to teach me how to, you know, actually play. He only had a Fluke, though, so the balance of ukulele power, if not skill, still swings in my direction.