Studs, Ice, and Snow

These are the new snow tires (or at least one of them). The studs are not as large as I would have liked, but they were out of the ones with 2" spikes. Notice the ACTUAL snow on the bottom left of the tire!

Dianne does not like it when I call it vibration. She says that it is just a little noisy. Vibration is still the word I would use to describe it - the tires that is. The studded tires to be precise. They vibrate. They make a strange humming noise when we drive down the road. It is not totally unlike driving on loose gravel, or on studded tires, but then I guess you would have to have studded tires to know what that was like. Each tire has about 23,902 studs. They are just little metal protrusions that stick out from the tire. I was told they are made of some alloy that even Superman uses on his Bat mobile, or something like that.

We just had them installed. It only took about 5 hours. That is a long time when you are waiting at Sams Club. We were told that they would only be about 3 hours at first, but then it turned into 4, and then 5. We went to lunch at a Mexican restaurant across the street. It took us 2 ½ hours to finish, and they still were not done. In the meantime I decided to walk around the store. I ended up at the pharmacists counter. I talked to the pharmacy and asked if they could give me anything for my irritation and inpatients. They said they had all sorts of goodies that would help, but I would need a doctors note first. Just for fun I pulled 2 out of my pocket and said, “ok, here - I think these will do”. I think the pharmacist almost passed out. I don’t think she was ready for me to pull out 2 scripts during that conversation. I had been to the Dr. earlier today to get set up as a patient, and start my new collection of pharmaceuticals. Since the drugs he prescribed were very cheap, I decided to get them filled just for fun.

To celebrate our new tires, we decided to drive over and across as much ice as we could find. Luckily for us there was quite a large puddle that had frozen over in the past several days. We decided to drive over it first. When we got there it was a frozen mass just waiting to be driven over and cracked into a thousand pieces. As we drove over it, something very strange happened. Actually nothing happened. We just drove over it and across it. Usually we hear ice cracking and breaking under our tires. It is the gratifying sound of driving over ice that you just broke. Not this time. I think we may have waited a little too long. The ice had frozen over so much that it was now solid. No cracking, no crunching, nothing. Not even a little break. When we went to the second location, it was the same thing. No crunching, no cracking, not a bit of noise. I tried to convince Dianne that we should try to drive across a shallow lake, but she reminded me of how expensive it would be to get the car fixed after we had it pulled out of the frozen mud. I realized that she was probably correct and agreed that it was probably not a good idea.

So now we have snow tire, and not a bit of snow on the ground. We do have ice, but it is not on the streets, and nowhere near being a threat. I will wait. I will wait for the 6 feet of snow, the 4 inches of ice, the sleet, the frozen rain. I am prepared. I am ready. Bring it on!!!!

AMENDMENT: Last night at about 12:30pm it started snowing and has not stopped since. The timing on the snow tires could not have been better!!