A Lucky Break So we made two round trips from Eugene to Portland and back over the weekend. →[More:]As a result of the combination of Daughter's rock camp and the fact she had tickets to the last ever Sleater Kinney show. And the fact that we could find no one to take care of the dog.

Anyway, on Sunday, we are driving north and a tire blows. Wife gets it off the freeway skillfully (with the added degree of difficulty of me yelling and gesturing how she should be doing that) and I find out that the traction thingie I have over the front hubs won't come off because I don't have a socket set with which to remove them.

After trying to use the jumper cables as a wrench, and drawing blood in the process, I limp the car up the ramp off the freeway (Ankeny Hill, middle of nowhere), and we see this guy, having stopped about a quarter mile in front of us, running though the dry parched field between the freeway on off ramp towards us. . .he's here to help and he miraculously has one of these Leatherman tools on his belt, which works to get the bolts off the spike-spider.

We both have black t shirts on, it's hot, we are sweating a lot but we change the tire to the dipshit little spare and it's actually got enough air pressure to drive on.

This guy just stopped out of the goodness of whatever, did not have an agenda, just being nice.

He lives in corvallis and there is a very good bottle of Pinot coming his way.