HEATWAVE

When's the last time you did a three axle alignment?

I also put Centramatics on all my drives when I installed the Yokohamas last December. I think that helped my situation. The wear on my drives has been very even.

It's another level of attention when you spend thousands on tires. I really go over my tires carefully during my inspections, using a pair of needle nose pliers to pull out rocks and a spray bottle of water and a splash of Dawn to check for leaks.

 

I had the same thing with my last set of drives. Uniroyals. Just one of them started cupping and wouldn’t stop. I switched to BFG’s and no problems so far.

I don’t know what causes one tire out of 8 to do that.

 

I've saw more dust storms this year than previous 10 years.
It's so dam hot. I'm surprised I've not drove though a dust storm, or a raging fire.

 

I’m getting really tired of it being 94 degrees every day, everywhere. I think I’m going to kick Al Gore’s ###.

 

The cat in the tall, thin tree

Joe Aaron, Columnist

Life at its very best is not a particularly easy row for any of us, but what if we were cats?

Did that sobering prospect ever occur to you while you were fumbling over a flat tire or trying to rake together enough money to pay the mortgage?

Cats, unless they are the pampered kind that lie in front of the fire on winter days and consent to eat only the expensive foods they see advertised on TV, often take it on the chin in this chancy world.

You always hear it said, for example, that it's bad luck for a black cat to cross your path, and it is. But all the bad luck, judging from the number of battered black carcasses I see lying along the pavement, is the black cats' — not ours.

Lucky for them they have nine lives, because they need them all.

I have additional proof.

I am told by a person whose reputation for veracity and undeviating straight shooting is almost legendary that a certain girl whose identity nobody seems to know became the owner of a kitten one day last summer.

Whether it was here or in Bone Gap, Ill., or near a bend in the Ganges River in India, I cannot say, but it was SOMEWHERE because it is a true story.

The kitten was, after the manner of its ilk, a lovable ball of energetic fur. But he liked to climb, almost better than he liked to romp with his little mistress. And the tree he liked to climb best of all was a spindly specimen out in the backyard.

But though this tree was sparse of trunk, it had attained an amazing height, much like a scrawny teenager who grows 6 inches overnight.

One afternoon the kitten scaled this tree, far above the chimney, and then he didn't know with any certainty how to get down again, which also is a trademark of its ilk.

So he hung on, away up yonder in the air, and set up an awful din.

The little girl was prostrated by concern and grief and set up quite a respectable din of her own — so great a din her father consented to come to the rescue.

He studied the tree only an instant before realizing it was too fragile for him to climb. A man, he decided, could bust his head that way.

So he leaned a ladder against its trunk and climbed to the top rung. But even by stretching his arms to their ultimate extension, he couldn't reach the yowling kitten.

But American fathers, whatever flaws may mar their character, are ingenious creatures.

So he got a rope from the garage, climbed the ladder again and tied the top around the tree, up as high as he could reach. Then he tied the other end to the bumper of his pickup truck and ve-e-ery slo-o-owly drove forward so the tree would bend toward the ground.

But American ingenuity is by no means the open-sesame for every problem, nor was it this time. The father overestimated the tensile strength of the rope, and when the tree bowed low toward the ground the rope snapped.

What was re-created all of a sudden in that backyard was what the Navy calls a catapult, used commonly for launching aircraft into the blue yonder from the flight deck of a carrier.

The tree, I am told, stood suddenly erect with a mighty WHIISH, and the kitten became airborne, attaining a speed shortly after liftoff of what I believe is referred to as Mach 1.

When last seen, he was tumbling tail over mustache high above the neighborhood, his ears laid back and his eyes tightly closed.

The entire family spent the rest of that day searching for him, to no avail. The little girl eventually dried her tears, and life fell back into its normal rut.

And if the mother of the family had not gone to the grocery store, the fate of the kitten might forever have remained a mystery.

But she DID go the store, and at the checkout lane was directly behind a woman who was paying for several kinds of cat food.

As she waited for her change, the woman told the most amazing story — of the day it rained cats from a clear sky.

She and her husband, she said, were sitting on their patio one summer's day sipping some cool libation when a kitten plummeted unexpectedly to earth at their feet, landing on all fours, just like a cat is said to do.

And all fours, it should be told, were broken like matchsticks, but the man and wife took the kitten to the vet who applied tiny splints, and the playfulness of old slowly was returning to the tiny creature.

When the woman left with her cat food, the clerk turned to our mother with a shake of her head and a disbelieving smile.

"Did you ever hear a more unbelievable story?" she asked.

But the mother just smiled without comment. She could have told a far stranger story if she'd been of a mind to.