Why don't I have more upper body strength?

This past Sunday, the 5th of June, was Motor City Pride. This day of LGBTQIA celebration takes place in my happy hometown of Ferndale. Yay Ferndale. It would seem, as Ferndale is my hometown, that I would have no trouble arriving on time, or at least within a reasonable margin (plus or minus 15 minutes). As fate would have it (and I don't usually believe in fate, but Sunday tested my lack of faith), however, I did not arrive at Pride until well after 3pm, with the ETA in Ferndale en 11am. Here is why:

When Alicia and I got out the door, it was approximately 10:30am. We knew that we were a little late, but only about 15 minutes. My mom and Mr. Dave were expecting us between 11 and 12, so we weren't too concerned. We walked over to my parking space, got in the car, and tried to leave the city. And by tried to leave the city I mean that we quickly realized that the Ann Arbor-Dexter Run would do it's best to thwart this plan. While I have nothing against runners, in fact, some of my best friends are runners, I do not care for the organizers of this event. They had blocked off all of the Main St. intersections except for Huron, and only one side of the Summit intersection was open. Now, it may seem very obvious, knowing all of this, for those of you who are veteran Ann Arbor drivers, that the easiest way to get onto M-14 from my parking space on First St. was to cross Main at Huron, take Fourth to Summit, and get onto Main and then M-14 from there. There were, however, no signs indicating that this would be the easiest route, or even indicating which intersections would be blocked off. As such, it took 45 minutes of driving around looking for an open intersection before we finally found a cop/coordinator who acted as though I were so silly for being confused but eventually told me which intersections were open. So we made it out of Ann Arbor.

Mostly... I think that we had probably effectively passed the city limits, we had passed M-23 and were almost at the Ford Rd. exit when we heard an interesting noise. Sort of thumping, sort of grating, sort of not promising in terms of our chances of making it to Ferndale. We realized almost immediately that it was the tire we had fixed with Fix-A-Flat (which works fabulously in the short term)... I pulled onto the shoulder and we got out and looked at the tire. It was oh-so-very flat. I called my mom to let her know that we'd be a little late, as it was 11:15am at that point. She expressed some doubt that we would be able to remove the lug nuts, but I wanted to give it a try. We had everything we needed except for biceps of steel. We had the car on the jack (not all the way, you're not supposed to do that until the lug nuts are off), the wrench out, the spare tire in the back, a bottle of gatorade to help us make it in the blazing sun, and a magazine to read after we realized that we needed my mom to drive out with Mr. Dave and a can of WD-40. I was standing on the wrench when I realized that those stupid nuts were not going to move on my watch.

Once Mr. Dave (and my mom, of course) the tire came off with ease, and the spare went right on. Upon closer examination, we saw that a tiny flap of tire had ripped off on three sides, letting all of the air out of the tire. We made it to the tire store somewhat near my house, got a new tire, picked up a cold 12-pk of Molson to thank my mom and Mr. Dave, and finally got to pride.

It was great.