I generally don’t get to show off my manliness. Last week, I made up for lost time.

I like to live the easy life as much as I can. I always say that my greatest home improvement skill is writing a check. The only kind of yard work I even remotely enjoy is vacuuming leaves because I get to carry around a big machine.

And don’t even get me started on car repairs. Thank God auto manufacturers have started to make things under the hood easier to figure out or I would eventually put oil in the windshield wiper fluid container.

So imagine my surprise when I walked out to my car last Monday afternoon and saw my right rear tire almost totally flat.

You would think that my first notion would be to shriek like a girl and sob until someone came to do the work for me. But I actually took on the situation as a challenge.

While I try to avoid as much labor as possible, I didn’t want anyone to think that I didn’t know how to change a tire. I worried I would be embarrassed if people knew I was that helpless.

So I did the first thing that came to mind – I tried to find a way to pump up the tire and get home safely so I could pay a mechanic to fix the real damage the next day.

But I could tell almost before I finished filling the tire that I needed to really get my hands dirty if I wanted to get home in one piece. First, I found the manual and made sure that I laid it inside the trunk as I read through the directions of even the simplest tasks. I wanted to look really smart if someone happened to drive by and check up on us.

Then I rolled up my shirt sleeves, got down on my knees and did some real old-fashioned manual labor.

I didn’t have any trouble as I removed the tire, which had a huge honking nail in it, and put the spare on. I called Maria and told her I wouldn’t be too late because I had fixed the problem.

She asked me if I thought I could get home on the spare, and I assured here I wouldn’t have a problem. Then I remembered about the flat tire my friend Edge got in college.

A bunch of us jumped in his old Suburban for a road trip to another school. Not too far out of town, a tire blew, and we put on the spare before resuming our trip. We made it there without difficulty, and returned OK the next day. That’s when Edge called his Dad to report the flat.

Naturally, Edge didn’t really have permission to use the car outside of errands around town, so he asked his Dad how far he though the spare could last. Only 40 miles or so, he told Edge, who had probably put 300 or so miles on the Suburban after the flat tire in our quest for fun.

Knowing I had survived that made me feel OK about the nearly 40 miles between Owings Mills and Hanover. Even if I was the one in charge of changing the tire.