I Bet Giant Monster-Fighting Mecha Never Have These Kinds Of Problems

Well, that was an interesting trip.

I realized that I hadn't driven the car out of town since I came back from my vacation, and I've been making a point of trying to get it out on the highway on a semi-regular basis, to keep the battery charged and prevent that thing that happened with the Neon, where the terminals would get all corroded because I wasn't using it enough. So I did what I usually do in such circumstances: made it an excuse to drive to Los Lunas and go to the movies.

Brief review of Pacific Rim, by the way: the monster-fighting is awesome, the attempts at having an actual plot less so.

Anyway, then I started to drive home. And got caught in an apocalyptic rainstorm. It was so bad I literally could not see three feet in front of me and had to pull over for a while. Twice. All while worrying that I might run out of gas, because I'd figured I had enough to make it there and back, but the gauge was starting to make me think maybe I'd miscalculated. And then, after pulling back onto the highway, my low tire pressure indicator came on. By the way, I love my car manual's advice for what to do when that happens: pull over in a safe spot and inflate the tire. With what, guys? My mouth? Anyway, I did pull over, into a rest area, waited for the rain to slack off, then looked at the tires. And managed to convince myself that one of them did look really low, enough so that I was afraid to use the tire gauge on it, lest I accidentally let out even more.

I then drove the last twelve miles home very slowly with my hazard lights on, fearing a blowout. But when I got to a gas station with an air pump and actually did check the tires, they all showed a little over 30 psi, which did not seem that horrible to me. I pumped them all up a couple psi, anyway, and by the time I got home the light was off. Possibly this was just an ill-timed coincidence, as I haven't actually put any air in those tires since I got the car, and they were bound to need it eventually. But I am nervous now, especially as I did notice that one of the tires has a scraped spot on it. I have no idea from where. It doesn't look like very deep damage, but I think I'll take it to the tire place tomorrow and have them take a look at it. Somehow, I have the sinking feeling this is going to end up costing me money.

Sigh. I try to do something nice for my car, and look how it repays me.