New Car!

Well ok new to us – a nice one at that. In fact we just purchased for RG the nicest car I think I have ever owned. It is a 2007 Honda Accord V6. While I know it isn’t RG’s dream car it is certainly an upgraded for her cruising around in the dent-mobile. The car is practically new with only 24k miles on it. It is a Graphite Silver and has all the options I think you could really need in a car. Power everything, in dash CD changer, cruise, tilt, traction control, and all that. I guess it doesn’t have a sunroof, satellite, leather, or heated seats, but that is all just extra stuff to break really.

I’ve got to say not only is this the nicest car I have ever owned it is one of the nicest to drive. The v6 just moves. In fact when we were test driving cars I got one of these on the freeway and when I went to pass someone I was in the high 90s without trying (so I will have to watch my lead foot). It has a pretty sporty suspension so you do feel the road but it doesn’t rattle you. The steering is perfectly balanced; I can certainly see why people are such fans of Honda. I will have no issue inheriting this car from the wife next time we get something new and retire my pickup.

Speaking of the truck I told RG when we drove it home from the dealer that after 2 weeks she would have no interest in driving the truck again. She told that she “loved” the truck and would still drive it. I just said “yes dear” and nodded. Well I was wrong, but she wasn’t right. It only took one week and she had no more interest in the truck. Though she claims that she will want to drive it when it snows I doubt it. I drove a car with traction control in the snow and it handled just fine. Unless there is 8-10 inches on the ground or more – when realistically you shouldn’t be driving – I can’t imagine a reason to drive the truck for her.

We kind of decided to buy the car quickly. Originally we were going to save for 8-10 months and buy a Murano. But a lot of things colluded to push RG to want a car of her own. Some having to do with not liking going to work in skirts and having to climb in and out of a truck to wanting to drive around her host grandma or some of the kids she used to nanny. The pick is simply not suited for these things and considering I bought 7 years ago when I was single and wanted something I could haul things around with you can’t really fault it for not being everything to everyone. So I looked online and noticed quite a few lease returns for sale.

With the credit crunch and then cash for clunkers a lot of dealers where coming into fall with a lot of extra inventories and decided to slash prices. So we thought why not now. We can’t get a Murano but we can certainly get a much better car for a lot less now. The v6 accords were all three to four thousand dollars under blue book. So we went looking. After driving a couple cars in the cities RG talked me into driving up to St. Cloud. Where there were a couple Accords we found online with very low miles.

DINKs again

That’s right folks Duel Income No Kids. RG and I are on the up and up again. After sending out what I can only imagine as thousands of resumes and applying on line to hundreds of companies RG started working again! As it seems things always happen she interviewed several times with no bites and then bam – she has two companies going after her - and why not she is super talented. She has some funny stories to go along with here hiring but I won’t tell those as I think she could share them in more detail as it all happened to her. That said we are certainly looking forward to the second pay check again. So now we get to figure out a new budget. Hopefully not as tight as the one we have been living with for the last six months.

So now it is pretty obvious how we could afford to buy a new TV. In fact the first 3 or so of RG’s pay checks went to paying off the credit cards and then to purchasing several things we had been wanting for a while; TV, new pots and pans, some clothes, etc. So now we have to buckle down though and start paying other things down as we still have a few loans out there. Now however we have a little more breathing room and it doesn’t seem like we are always waiting for the next check to come. In fact it is really nice because RG and I are both paid bi-weekly and on alternating weeks. So we get a paycheck every Friday. SWEET.

Of course this also means RG is going to have to start getting up early in the morning like the rest of us and she won’t be able to volunteer as much, but these are the sacrifices made with having a job. Also it means on Fridays when I work from home she will be jealous of me and want to come home early. Plus she will probably be more tired but it will still be better than what she had to put up with in Moscow! 13 hours a day from when she left her apartment to when she could get home. Hour and ½ subway rides each way plus 10 hour days. Now she has only a 12 minute drive. She can come home for lunch if she wanted.

So while we are excited about being DINKs again we do need to make sure we don’t go crazy and keep spending. In fact this should finally give us a chance to get ahead and put a little a way for a rainy day and help out some more with charity. Of course it does let us get a few nice things too!

The House to Ourselves, Almost

Well even though RG and I have been married for over two years we have never really lived in a home of our own, on our own for much of that time. When we got married her folks were staying with us. Then we had a couple of months and RG had to head over to Russia to fulfill her scholarship requirement. When she finally was able to move home in February we had a renter who I let move in while I was working in the UK so someone would be around to watch the house. We didn’t see any reason to kick him out right away figuring he wouldn’t want to stay forever anyway. So at the beginning of August he moved out and we almost had the house to ourselves again. But my sister needed a place to stay until the house she was going to live in for college was ready so she is staying with us.

But since she didn’t move all her stuff in and is just using the guest bedroom. Also a lot of the time we have one or both of my parents staying as they handle some business on the house also. Not that we mind, but having a house to ourselves is going to be new thing for us really. It will be nice to have a quite house. It will also be nice to have the driveway open for our truck. Not to mention all the stuff that will be gone from the garage and basement. So once September gets here we will be moving into a new phase of our lives. I actually think it might be a little strange as I have never lived by myself. I went from living in my folks house to an apartment with friends to my house with roommates. The short time I spent in Iowa I had roommates, and then I got married. So this will be the closest I guess I will ever get to it.

I can’t wait it will be nice to have those rooms back. Maybe I can even use one as an office, at least for now. I think RG is also excited. Not that she minds the company but I think she likes to have some time to herself to wind down and an empty house helps with that even when the people in the house are family and you like having them around. At any rate it will be nice to have the change.

Un-Dent-Mobile Part 1

Back in 2007 my poor ole pickup was backed into. I was at the city transfer station a place you can dump construction material if you are a city resident. And the clown backed into my truck and drove off. Not fun. The cops didn’t care, I filed papers with the state and nothing happened. Since then I have been driving a dent-mobile. The front passenger fender has a nice set of dent and scratches that I just haven’t done anything about. Well actually I tried to get insurance involved but because the damage was $20 or so less than my deductible of a thousand bucks so they couldn’t help. Nice. But that is the risk of having a high deductible I guess.

So anyway my buddy LJ gave sent me a link to this website that allows you to search the inventories of most of the salvage yards in the country. So every once and a while I would search for a fender from a truck that matched mine. I found one four or five months after the collision (not an accident the guy was just stupid) but it had a pin stripe where mine doesn’t bummer. Nothing else has shown up in the last couple years close to home. So I tried changing my tactics and looked close to my client. Sure enough I found one an hour and a half away from my client. So I decided to buy it and drive it home. $75 dollars for a fender with a couple quarter sized dings is a lot better than $500 for a new one that needs $300 of paint. One day after a client service day where we volunteered at some charities I skipped the party afterwards and drove up to Springfield Missouri.

The drive itself was uneventful. The salvage yard is on the edge of the city and defiantly on the other side of the tracks. Nothing in the area was up kept, there were abandoned warehouses, broken down cars along the road, tons of pot holes, and the whole area seemed littered with garbage. When I found the place I pulled in and the rental car was easily the newest in the area. But I have been to salvage yards before and this isn’t too uncommon. Coming out of the building was a guy who I don’t think has worn a shirt in 5 years; all he was wearing were cut off shorts and sandals. His skin was a dark tan color and seriously looked like leather. He was friendly enough greeting me with a “Hi” I answered “How’s it going?” He responded simply “it’s goin.” Of course he mumbled it sounding a little bit like Boomhower from King of the Hill. I figured it was just a local coming to get parts for his car. Nope.

In fact this fellow was an employee. When I walked in there were two more gentlemen wearing the exact same outfits. It must have been the company uniform. No shirt, sandals, and a cut off. A third guy walked in wearing the same ensemble but with an old muscle shirt and a red trucker’s cap. It was a scene. The decorations of the place include a mix of three different kinds of items. Notices to customers about return policies or warnings on buying used electronic items, Christian posters like I have never seen, and very off beat and somewhat dirty jokes! The second category was a new one to me. They had a poster talking about Jesus’ race car (I didn’t follow it), one denouncing evolution, and a couple others with various quotes that didn’t seem to go with the what the poster was actually trying to say. But hey they had the fender I needed and it was a good price so I bought and drove it back to the client site.

Now I had to figure out what to do with it. I put it in my room in the corporate apartment. So for a month a half I had a truck fender sitting in my room. I figured to get it home I would just drive the rental car home instead of flying. There would be no way to ship the fender or put it on the plane so that is what I did. I drove the 9 hours home one Thursday afternoon and back again Sunday night. No the most pleasant thing but when you consider it normally took me 6 hours to get there Mondays and 4 hours to get home it was only 8 extra hours but now the fender is in my garage. Of course my truck is still the dent-mobile until I get the motivation to install the new part.

I guess I should have ordered a bigger TV

I am a very lucky guy. Normally when I get a little grief at home, it is about things most people would love to get grief about. Recently we needed to buy a new TV. The only one we owned is a 12 year old 19 inch mono tube TV that I bought right after high school. Up until now I have always had roommates with much larger nicer TVs so why buy my own? I just used theirs. Well finally the last roommate/renter was moving out and we would be going to the 19 inch with rabbit ears and digital tuner box thanks to the government’s digital TV switch program. We COULD have gotten along fine with this. It is all we used for almost a year at one point.

In fact RG watches very little TV; most of it on the weekends when I am home and then it is mostly movies. In fact the only show she watches religiously is house and I think ½ the time she gets the DVDs or watches it on her computer. In fact I think she watches her computer more than the TV. But still I thought it would be nice to get a nice new modern TV. I mean I am over 30 and have a pretty good job so getting a nice TV is not that huge of a deal. Of course it hadn’t happened for over a decade mostly because I was cheap and as mentioned above there were free options! Heh.

So we talked it over and decided we would get a new TV. RG didn’t have a ton of input she wanted an LG but I wanted a plasma, but LG stopped making Plasma in the sizes we were thinking about so we settled on a Panasonic mid-line model. The reviews were really good so I talked her into that brand. So I started watching the market and found some pretty good deals. Of course the part that really made it possible was that RG got a new job so we felt we had a little money to burn after being on a tight budget for 7 months. So a couple weeks before our renter moved out I found a great deal online. I was at least a hundred bucks cheaper than I had seen before so I talked it over with RG and ordered it.

As I normally do I sent the purchase confirmation and email invoice on to the wife and didn’t think much of it. A few hours later I got a call from her when she saw it asking what the heck I was doing? What—What—What!? What was she talking about we talked about getting this TV for months. How could she be upset. I was thinking. So she asked what the heck are you doing – I thought we were getting a BIGGER TV…. Huh? Really? You Think? I thought. I had always figured the size we ordered was plenty. Our living/family room isn’t that big. So we talked about it and yep she was sure we should go bigger… So while we were on the phone I looked up the bigger models of the same TV on the same website. We could go up 1 size for ~$150. So that sounded good. Then I started to joke that we should go up 2 sizes because the next size was only ~$50 more than 1 size up. I was joking.

She wasn’t she said buy it! Crazy, how many wives would tell their husbands to go out and get a bigger TV, 2 sizes bigger even. Well I wasn’t sure that a TV that big would fit in our family room but I had to call and change the order within 24 hours. SO off I went to Wal-Mart, the only place open at 10 at night to look at the different sizes of TV. I also called up a few friends for their advice. I didn’t get much advice beyond Get the biggest TV you can afford. Huh. Well that is one way to go. I thought about it and even though I thought we should go smaller I got the biggest one we were looking at. It is a good thing we didn’t go bigger yet! This one fits with maybe ¼ inch left on either side. the neighbors can watch our TV from a block away, and we sit close enough to this one to see too much detail on HD feeds. So it was a good choice.

A strange and unexpected side effect of the new TV was more space in our living room. All the previous TVs had been tube or projection TVs and this one is a flat screen. So we actually gained 15 inches of floor space in front of the TV. I’ll tell you what – it is great to have the problem of the wife thinking you ordered too small of a TV, even if the bigger TV doesn’t get used any more than the little one!

The Lawn

Ok Ok I finally got a little embarrassed - about the state of my lawn. After living in the house for 8 and ½ years I finally decided, or rather it may have been decided for me, that it was time to do something about the state of my lawn. Of course my house is now 104 years old and I bought it in a state of somewhat disrepair. So I always have a long list of to-dos on the house. Up until now I have focused mostly on the interior of the house; repairing cracked walls, restoring the wood work, restoring the wood floors, and basically fixing it up one room at a time. The yard was always on my list but pretty far down.

This year though it just looked miserable in the spring. I normally would through some fertilizer out and some fresh seed twice a year. I also mow and line-trim it a few times a month. Last year as I was out of the country I could do these things. Instead I ended up hiring a service just to keep I mowed. Partial to keep my neighbors happy and partial to make it look lived in to keep criminals from thinking it was vacant. Last year must have been pretty dry and I don’t think the service took into consideration the state of the grass, because along one side of my house I have steep hill along the side walk where 60% of the grass had been tore up. I believe this was probably an affect of the large mowers used by the lawn service paired with dry grass and the incline of the hill. At any rate it was an awful mess.

So we decided to see if we could green things up again. Of course I have to give most of the credit to my lovely wife. While I may have come up with the how to fix things she had to do most of the work. All summer long we have been seeding, watering, and fertilizing the grass. We have tried several different seeds and methods. But really the best thing seem to be to use a certain Minnesota grass seed mixture, put an 1/8 inch of dirt over it, and then water it 4-5 times a week (I should say that RG was the one doing all the watering and care taking as I typically am gone all week). In fact we paid easily 2.5 times as much for the water bill as the last few years. But it has been worth it. After about 5-6 weeks our lawn was easily the nicest on the block! Who knew it could happen so fast. Plus we put in a flower bed, two planters, replaced a huge ugly old bush, and replaced some other bushes with more seed. It looks great.

I’m certain glad I didn’t wait until everything in the house was finished to work on the lawn. It really does feel good to come back to a home with such a lush flower filled. Someday I actually hope to put in a retaining wall and I know next year RG is going to demand more flower space and planters. So of course I can feel the continuation of domestic life to impress itself on me someday soon I think I will become a stereo typical family man. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

When We are Married

Simply put I don’t go out and enjoy all that life has to offer. One thing I could use a little more of is the some exposure to the arts. We are lucky in that Minneapolis has one of the greatest art scenes in the country. Boasting many museums, theaters, music venues, and anything else you could want only New York, Chicago, or maybe LA could compete. Recently one theater the Orpheum built a new 3 stage building along the river. It is a strange blue and yellow building that has a skyway jutting out that goes nowhere and yellow towers the size of chimneys sticking out of the roof. It also sports a large vertical marquee that scrolls the names and dates of upcoming or current shows. Are the theaters is a large park with circular sidewalks and curvy hills that provide a nice place to lay in the grass and see the river. All of this on the edge of down town close to the center of the city.

The building has been open for a couple of seasons and only recently did we get to a show there. A wonderful British show called “When we are Married”. RG received the tickets for being a volunteer for the local ALS society and we went the other night. I enjoyed it quite a bit. The inside of the theater is almost as strange as the out. The main lobby is kind of narrow with white walls the ticket counter is toward the back and it is a little disorientating. Once you go up a two story escalator there are some hallways to roam with leather chairs facing out so you can see the view through yellow tinted windows. Most of the second floor is taken up by a bar and restaurant that is open to everyone whether attending a show or not. On one side of the building one can walk out onto the skyway to nowhere to an observation deck that gives a great view of the river. Though I suspect it is usually windy there.

Once inside one of the theaters the presentation is quite cozy. The seating wraps around 3 sides of the stage and the walls are painted warm reds, yellows, and oranges. It is a very comfortable setting. There is a main floor and a balcony. We were sitting on the left side of the stage midway back on the first floor. At first I thought the view was going to be to the actors backs but this was not the case. They made sure to constantly move around facing all sides of the stage so the entire audience was addressed.

The show itself was great. I didn’t know any of the actors but they did a great job. The story is placed about the turn of last century, around 1900. It is about 3 established society couples. I won’t give too much away but the men are muckie-mucks in the church and want to fire the new organist who is seen out late at night with a woman! When they confront him he delivers a bombshell that the 3 men are not actually married because the priest who married all three of them was not licensed. This does not go over well because it would mean they had spent the last 30 years living in sin. The rest of the show goes on to explore their various lives and relationships through various conversation about what they should do about their situations. Of course the wives find out and the plot takes off from there. It is a great piece of British comedy and I would easily go see it again. My single complaint, having just spent 10 months in Britain, was how bad the actor’s “British” accents were. They sounded more Irish than northern English. Other than that it was a great show and we had a great night out.