creativeartworksblog

Autoweek

We have a 2006 Honda Ridgeline truck like this one, except ours isn’t as clean and shiny as the one in this picture.

Today, as part of our preparing for winter list, we changed the tires in our shop.

When we bought it, we bought 4 extra wheels and then bought snow tires. We had the tires mounted and balanced on the wheels and brought them home to store in our shop.  (This is really important because our driveway is STEEP, and about 650 feet long.) The driveway is on the north side of our property and is shaded all the way down, so we still have ice and snow when the rest of the planet has thawed and forgotten the storm.)

Twice a year my husband and I change the tires. Today we took off the regular tires and put on the snow tires for winter.  This is a laborious process, and it definitely takes both of us, but we save about half a day and about $80 doing it ourselves. We have this down to a routine. I’m the go-fer, moving tires around, finding the wheel nuts and special tool we need to get the regular tires off. I hand my husband the tools and parts he needs, and he then hefts the tires up and on the car. We have an air compressor so we can check the tire pressure when the tires have been changed to be sure the pressure is right for the truck. Today we discovered that our emergency spare, which is supposed to have 60 psi pressure, only had 48!

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My husband keeps a log of when we do major stuff. He found that the battery on the truck is only 2 years old, so should get us through the winter nicely. The oil was changed last month. We should be fixed now for safe travel in the winter. The only thing we need to finish the job is putting our emergency bags in the car if we’re going on a trip or any significant distance from home.

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Another thing we did was get the fireplace ready for winter. We have discovered we chose well when we bought our fireplace insert over 30 years ago. It’s called a “Country Flame” fireplace insert. It burns really cleanly. We had our chimney checked a few years ago, feeling guilty that we had NEVER had it cleaned. The guy thought the house was new! Lucky us!!! We are now set up to burn our first fire when needed, with wood, kindling, etc. ready for a lighted match. We had to get a new rug to protect our carpet this year because we moved the old one into the utility room to give our older dog, Bambi, more traction when he tries to get up out of bed.

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The third thing we did today to get ready for winter was change the LED insert for the light outside the shop. It’s on a timer. When we get ready to walk back to the house, we can turn on a timer which lights the light for however long we’ve set so that we can see easily to get back to the house. It lasted a long time, but we had to take out the little bitty flashlights we have on our key rings last time because the insert had finally burned out. We had a replacement part, and so were able to get out the ladder, take off the front glass of the light, and put in the insert. (My husband went up the ladder and changed the insert, since I tend to freeze when I go up a ladder. I held the ladder for him, then the front glass of the light, handed him the insert, then the light front, then held the ladder as he came down.) He’s the brains. as well as brawn – I’m the go-fer. It’s SO much easier to do stuff like this in the daytime, when the weather is glorious, like today, than during sleet. We’ll get a replacement insert tomorrow when we go to town so it’ll be there waiting the next time we need one.

It’s almost 5pm and I did not get out in the yard to do the leaf mulching. Bah. Humbug. Hopefully, we’ll have another nice day tomorrow and I can get that done.

The days go whizzing past my head….