death rattle

we loved the forester! it rides smoothly, has good acceleration, is comfortable, spacious, etc. literally everything i hoped it would be. all of the windows and speakers even work!

unfortunately, when we got back from our test drive, a manager was there to look at erma and give us his trade-in estimate: $100. maybe $200, depending. just from walking around her, he thought $1000, but then he turned erma on and pressed the gas while in park and heard what he termed a "death rattle." he said that rattle i've been hearing is a deep engine knock that's indicative of piston problems. super. oh, and that there's no way to effectively and inexpensively fix it - you either have to rebuild the engine, or drop in a new one. hoorah. we could maybe get a little bit more by selling it on our own, according to him, but probably not over $1000 max. but, he also said that while she could last another year or two and be fine, she could also seize up at any time and just die ... or shoot a piston through the engine, if i hit things just right. which, considering that i have an hour and a half of commute time each day, half of which is on the interstate, puts an extra feeling of emphasis on finding a replacement. obviously we'll take erma in to an objective mechanic to get an outside opinion before we decide what to do, but this still changes things as we were hoping to get closer to $1500 on a trade in. so now scott's suggesting that we get something smaller like a camry or prius now, and then in a few years we could get a forester and he would take the smaller car. bah! i'm pouty because i want a forester, and because i don't want to die mid-commute, and because i'm finding it hard to be objective in looking at other cars online.

tgif

yay!!! after all of that talk about waiting a few months to buy a car, we're going to go test drive one tonight! scott's dropping dinner at our friends' at 5 while i head straight to office to meet him - a dealer that has a few well-priced foresters happens to be maybe two hundred yards down the street from his office building. (i just checked their website - they apparently have 36 total cars, 6 of which are '08 foresters ... we think that'll give us a little edge in talking them down more.) i'm super excited. not only have i loved the forester from afar for four years, i've never gotten to be a part of choosing my own car. that's completely fine, of course, because my parents have always lovingly provided a car for me, and chosen good (usually) reliable cars that i've enjoyed ... but there's just something about getting to choose your own car and having almost 100% control over the decision and knowing that this is absolutely what you want that i am excited about. (plus i'm looking forward to hopefully not driving erma that much longer - she's developed a full fledged rattle above 30mph.)

all that to say, i've realized that i get emotionally attached to the oddest things. a few years ago, the summer before my wedding, i found myself really grieving i-55 - it had been a mainstay of my life over the past several years, being the main route between my parents' home and my life at college. and then last year when my work upgraded me to an iphone on the company plan, i was genuinely sad that i wouldn't be able to use my cute pink razr phone anymore. two weeks ago, when we first began the discussion about replacing erma - the car that i've had a mild contempt for since my parents bought her for me back in college, whose back window rolls down but not up, who bucks on the interstate and requires three and a half lanes to make a u-turn - i was surprised to find myself getting mopey and nostalgic at the prospect of not driving her anymore. for all the grief erma's caused me, she still gets 30mpg, has been reasonably reliable over the past few years, was free to me, and fits in the tiny parking spots in my garage at work ... even though she has her quirks, they're quirks that i know. (i think i'll get over it, though.)

oh, and in case you were wondering how that lemon pepper shrimp scampi with orzo recipe turned out last weekend: it was fabulous. tasty, healthy, and really quick to make. in fact, i'm pretty sure i picked it to make in the first place because it was in cooking light's 20-30 minute dinner section.

relaxin all cool

well we didn't end up doing yard work - or really, much of anything. i had great intentions of getting our master bathroom painted, but it was gross and gray and cloudy and rainy all weekend, and chilling in bed reading was just so much more appealing. so i did! we actually started taping the bathroom at about 4pm on monday - but then goo came over at 4:45 to do laundry and have dinner, so we halted and hung out with her instead.

i got most of the priming done this week - just a few spots left to get primed and then the painting can begin. nice white ceiling, medium beigey-gray walls (the same color as the top of our dining room - i want to say it's behr's castle path - 730c-3, but since i just used behr's color swatches and had them color matched into kilz paint bases, i'm not positive), bright glossy white on the vanity and medicine cabinet and towel rack and shelves. scott was very skeptical about my choice of grey for the bathroom, and tried suggesting green (i've trained the boy well) or at least having an accent wall, but the bathroom is seriously tiny, and i think any actual colors on the walls would just be too much. and i don't want green paint reflecting back on me in the morning when i'm trying to put on makeup - yikes. plus, there are plenty of fun colorful ways to accessorize bathrooms. so that's a side project for the next few weeks! scott's going with his dad to the college world series in omaha june 12-14, so i think i'll try to plan things so that i'm able to do most of the painting that weekend and get it done before he gets back. i'm so looking forward to having a nice clean put-together bathroom to use when we have company.

last night after work i got together with the girls from our small group for dinner, and since scott's last ultimate game was cancelled due to half of his team dropping off, he and the guys got together to watch the nuggets game. it was fun, even if my inner introvert reared its head and near the end and made me very excited to go home and be alone. tonight is small group, tomorrow night is date night (plus taking dinner to friends who just had a miscarriage and are getting a d&c tomorrow - yikes), and saturday we're going biking up near breck/frisco with small group friends! (we like our small group.) and then sunday the missionary couple that our sunday school class supports are going to be in town, so we're having them over for dinner with our small group that night. hmm. i think after sunday we won't see our small group people for a whole week, which may be well needed at that point.

we're still debating the car thing - scott made the point the other night that with all of the driving we're doing this summer, this might be the time to trade erma in (i tallied it up, and we're looking at at least 2000 miles in state this summer). but i think we're sort of waiting on scott's yearly bonus to come in (it's usually late june/early july) so that we can pay cash. so we'll see!

long weekend

bah! i had to stay at work until 5pm, and i was not a happy camper. just me and one coworker most of the day, and then he left at 3:30 ... the last call that came in was at 1:15 (out of 5 calls total all day - two of which were solicitors, and none of which were important). however, for the next three days ... FREEDOM! hoorah! tonight we're cleaning the house, tomorrow a.m. is helping friends move, tomorrow p.m. we're hosting an event/bbq for our sunday school class, then sunday and monday no plans! (except for likely yard work.)

even better: tonight for dinner, i'm making finally making a lemon pepper shrimp scampi with orzo recipe that i've been moving around the calendar for two months now.

to boldly go

just one more teensy car comment, then i promise i'll move on. i was looking up specs on my current car ('99 saturn sl2 that goes by the name of erma), and found a roadtest review on consumer reports. technically, it's for the '00 model, but it's totally spot on:

The Saturn provides the worst driving experience of the group. Its ride feels unsettled, with sharp bumps sending harsh vibrations through the car's body. A full load only makes the ride less settled. The car is also noisy. The engine growls when accelerating, pronounced wind noise intrudes at speed, and gear whine adds an air of crudeness.

Although it's the sporty version of the S-Series sedans, the SL2 lacks the handling agility of many other small cars. It corners with fairly pronounced body roll, and the tires squeal prematurely. The steering isn't very responsive, with ordinary turns requiring more steering-wheel input than in other cars. Plus, a wide 40-foot turning circle makes parking clumsy.

we especially laughed at the knock on the turning radius - it's so true. scott usually equates erma to rosie o'donnell when he's trying to pull a u-turn.

anyway, we decided to do our date night on thursday night rather than friday this week, because we are getting old. literally, scott suggested going out on thursday, i said, "or we could just do friday like normal," and he said it might be better to do thursday so we don't have to deal with all of the teenagers at the movies on friday night - and i quickly agreed. plus we based our going out on what coupons we had available. for dinner, we used our 50% off coupon at this colorado chain called c.b. & potts, which was surprisingly good. we figured it'd be sort of like another applebee's (which isn't bad - we like applebee's), but while they had a good burger selection, they also had really tasty "real" entrees. (and the feel of the place was a little bit nicer, but still casual.) i had chicken tenderloins in a porter/mushroom sauce with mashed potatoes and green beans. then, we used our movie theater coupon ($6.50/ea rather than $10/ea) and went to see star trek which was AWESOME! i totally grew up watching star trek: the next generation (and even a little bit of deep space 9 and voyager), but other than the movies, didn't have a whole lot of exposure to the original star trek. they did a great job of making it accessible to non-trekkies, but i think still keeping the feel of the original ... plus they had some amazing action scenes. i had wanted to see it from the first preview we saw, while scott was very skeptical - he changed his tune quickly once it got 95% good reviews on rottentomatoes. seriously, it was fabulous, and you should definitely go see it.

my spreadsheet

it's been a quiet week at the office, so yesterday, i decided to throw myself headlong into the car researching. i found a website that walks you through all of your desires, expectations, and needs in a car, and then gives you twenty matches to look into - it's pretty neat! so i took the quiz, then eliminated a few models based purely on size (i said i wanted good fuel economy, so it recommended the toyota yaris, which is miniscule - yikes!). it was helpful, though, in showing me options that i either hadn't thought would fit my desires, or that i just hadn't thought of period.

anyway, once i had my matches, i went over to consumer reports to get more info - things like overall rating, road test results, overall gas mileage, cargo and passenger space. then i went to cars.com and looked up each model, and found the lowest priced car that met my requirements (under 35,000 miles, under $17k, and a color that i wouldn't hate driving for the next 10 years - ie, no purple or bright testesterone blue). then i plugged all of that into a spreadsheet, figured out the fuel cost over the presumed life of the car (100,000 miles at $3/gal ... i'm an optimist), the fuel cost per year (12,000 miles a year at $3/gal), the overall total cost of car purchase price + lifetime fuel cost. i used that to eliminate some of the unnecessarily expensive cars, like a rav4. and ... voila! (you can click the pic to make it bigger - i had to

do a screenshot because i couldn't figure out how to just copy and paste and keep the right formatting.)

the spreadsheet certainly doesn't make the decision for us, but it does help. it's an interesting balance to figure out what is the right car for us. i want a car that's big enough - with enough cargo space - that in, say, five years when we have two kids, one still in a stroller, and we want to drive to see family for a week at christmas time, we can still fit all of our luggage and kid gear and presents and not be driving with our heads stuck out the windows. on the other hand, though, i want something with decent fuel economy so that i'm not killing the environment and my wallet with my current daily commute. in looking at the spreadsheet, scott said he thinks a prius would be too small for our primary family car, which means the honda fit is out as well since they're even smaller. (definitely cars to keep in mind, though, when we go to replace his truck in a few years.)

i had initially compared the monthly total cost difference of each car with the prius, but taking the prius and fit out of the equation, it only ends up being about $30/month more expensive to have a forester than a matrix, or $6/month more to have an impreza than a matrix. enlightening, yes? (obviously this doesn't take registration or insurance fees or maintenance costs into consideration ... maybe i'll see what i can do about that info as we move closer to a real decision, rather than dealing solely in hypotheticals like this.)

next up is test driving some cars, but at this point i think we're leaning toward waiting a few months to purchase, so that we can save up the rest of the cash needed to buy a car outright. so why did i just spend a full day putting together this lovely spreadsheet? because it was fun! also, i like having appropriate expectations looking forward. if i'm going to have my heart broken by a forester being absolutely and completely impractical, i want to know now.

more planning.

i really enjoy planning things. today: car and summer vacation. let's start with the summer vacation ...

i was checking out the meals and steals section on a local radio station's website, and found a deal for a white water rafting company - $50 certificates for $25. scott's been wanting to go rafting for a while, and i'd toyed with the idea of fitting it into one of our summer vacations, so i checked out their website. come to find out one of their bases is maybe a half hour from where we're planning on staying for a weekend in july ... interesting. i called to check availability and make sure i could use the certificates for the trip i was looking at, and it's a go! i can use one certificate per person per trip, which would save us $50, so a full day of rafting for two will only cost us about $120 - much better than the $170+ that it would cost normally (which seems to be the going rate - i checked out a few outfitters' websites). anyway, as i was thinking about it, i had the brilliant brainstorm that i can get the whole thing booked without telling scott, and surprise him with it as a late birthday present! i think it's brilliant, and he'll love it, and now i only need to come up with an excuse to get him to leave the house at 7am that morning ... and figure out a plan to pack rafting gear without him getting suspicious. fun fun! (oh, and it is a surprise, so shhh! i feel free to post it here because he never looks at my blog. and if he does, he just ruined his own surprise which is his own darn fault.)

my second fun-with-planning adventure is car related. we talked a little last weekend and sort of planned to just start saving up money to put toward a newer car later this year, and agreed that the price i found on that used forester was a good one. sitting at work this afternoon, though, i meandered over to postnewsautos.com again (online classifieds) and ran a search. last week, the lowest priced 2008s i found were $15,991 with 30-35k miles on them (used rentals); this week, i found 8 2008s with comprable miles priced lower than that, including 4 at $14,995. intriguing, right? i'd like to pay cash if at all possible (we're working our way toward the dave ramsey debt free plan), and between a small bonus scott recently got, some extra money we had saved toward the backyard wall, trade in on erma, and the extra cash from our budget this month, we're probably about halfway there (give or take). which means that we could either borrow half from our emergency fund, or take a small car loan out for half - either way, i don't know that dave ramsey would necessarily approve ... or we could wait until this fall when the 2010s come out, and see what that does to the 2008 prices (and we'd likely be a lot closer to having enough money to buy the car outright at that point). but this seems like such a good deal! even looking at 07s, there are only 2 that are less expensive than that, and the only '06 with reasonable mileage is the same price as these. hmm hmm hmm. i'm seriously tempted, and scott said we could talk about it tonight. (he also said i could get a forester if he can get a 42" flat panel tv, though - which he's been begging for for months, despite the fact that our 6 year old flat screen tv works perfectly fine - so we'll see.) oh, and keep in mind that despite my glowing adoration of the subaru forester, i've never actually driven one, so that might come into play as well.

free trees

intriguing! i was googling around just now see if there are any tree giveaways in the area, and while i didn't find any that apply to me, i did find a website called www.freetreesandplants.com. while i'm an optimist, i'm also a skeptic, and immediately thought it seemed too good to be true - particularly since they use "sheltered workshops" with disabled workers, so in addition to cheap plants you also help workers with disabilities - but i think it actually is true! (i googled the website names and found a few gardening boards that mentioned having success with it.) for an $8 processing/shipping fee (per plant), they'll send you "free" trees, shrubs, perennials, bulbs, whatever. they seem to have a pretty good selection, as long as you're not too terribly picky. i'm guessing the plants are pretty small, but i might be willing to give it a shot!

the plan

isn't it pretty? slightly overwhelming at first glance, i know, but let me see if i can give you a little walk-through.

along the very back is our lovely new retaining wall, and directly in front of that you can see some sort of ghosted circles - those are our russian olives. for existing plants, he drew an "x" in the middle, for stuff he wants us to add, there's a "+" in the middle of the plant. fluffy (deciduous?) trees are circles, evergreens are more star-shaped, and the bigger the circle, the bigger the tree - the circle represents the diameter of the mature tree canopy at the fullest point.

what else ... the covered patio and shed on the side are already there, and the sidewalk from the patio to the front of the house is not - it runs through what is currently a very weedy rock bed. seriously, there have got to be 100+ giant thistles in there. (we're working on that.) the front yard shape is pretty much the same as what we currently have, and the back yard is similar, but curvier. the front stoop isn't nearly that cool right now - he wants us to remove the iron railing along the front of it, move it up flush with the front line of the house, and add steps down the front with a little pavestone pad to make the front more accessible. pretty much any plant that is labeled is something he wants us to add, and i think most of the lines showed up where he pointed from the name to where the plant goes. (let me know if you have any other questions.)

and then there's the price sheet for the plants, which i think is downright comical. we did get a few coupons for free plants from the nursery, but i think we'll maybe do the plants in the front yard this year, and save the back yard for next year. he also wanted us to mulch the front - it's currently rock - and we're definitely debating the merits of that. on the one hand, we already have the rock, but on the other, the rock is way full of weed seeds (which is hard to remedy), and we'd have to pull it all out to replace the 40 year old broken down weed barrier underneath anyway. we'll see.

car envy

last friday as i was driving home, i noticed a sudden intense vibration in the steering wheel - to the point where it was vibrating my whole arm. it was vaguely disconcerting (particularly as i was going about 70mph on the interstate at that moment), but it went away after a minute or two, and i could tell i didn't have a flat tire or anything. i figured it was just another sign of erma aging (she also developed this sort of flappy rattle under the hood that comes and goes when you accelerate, and the steering wheel alignment is off), so we started talking about what kind of car we'd want to replace erma with, because at 110,000 miles, she's obivously not going to survive forever.

anyway, i was thinking about her problems just now, and it occurred to me that the vibration and left-of-center steering wheel could both be symptoms of a wheel alignment issue, so i decided to google it. according to at least this site, the vibration isn't necessarily wheel alignment, but more wheel balance! and it doesn't seem to be a problem for anything more than driver comfort, so i'm okay with leaving it be for the time being. i am glad at least to know that my car isn't going to combust in the midst of my daily commute.

in the meantime, however, i started looking at cars and car reviews online (i enjoy researching even if we're not going to act on it immediately - at least i'll have a good idea of our expectations, and we can have a better idea of how much money to save for a car so that we're prepared when the time comes) ... and i've fallen in love. the subaru forester has been my dream car for several years now, and while i've looked at a variety of cars on consumer reports, ranging from the toyota camry to a hyundai santa fe, the forester still just gets me every time. great relability ratings, good fuel economy, high owner satisfaction ... and it's just a beautiful vehicle. plus, such a great price on a 2008 model! i think scott and i are going to maybe have a more in depth conversation about cars this weekend. i don't see us acting immediately, but a girl can dream, right?

spider season

ick ick ick. we have apparently reached the time of year when the inside of our house is cooler and more comfy than outside, and spiders find that attractive. i spent almost two glorious hours laying outside in the sun this afternoon*, and since then i've discovered two very large, black, hairy spiders inside my house. i do not like this!

* - my boss came up front this morning, and told me that he was closing the office at 3 because the weather was so beautiful outside - with the stipulations, though, that we (me and my coworker) had to go spend the time outside and do something athleticy with people we love. i'm down with that! my coworker went on a bike ride with her son; i decided to lay in the sun until scott got home, and then we went to the gym. that kind of counts, right?

also, tonight is the biggest loser's season finale. i love that show! they're currently showing the flashback of the beginning of the season, and it's super inspirational. honestly, i credit this show with making me like working out - in part because it gives good ideas of stuff to do at the gym, and in part because i look at these morbidly obese people and figure, if they can run on a treadmill, i can.

fresh start!

hello, new blog!

i really feel as though i should have something spectacular and inspiring or earth shattering to say to break in the new site, but really, i've got nothing. on to business as usual, i suppose. our landscape plan came in the mail last night! i meant to bring it to work today to scan, but in my usual rush to get out the door in time to get to work three minutes late, i forgot it on the kitchen table. tomorrow, i promise. i still like the landscape plan, and i also like that i feel free to swap out plants as my aesthetic tastes and pocketbook desire - for instance, he suggested a globe blue spruce shrub where we had taken out the ginormo pine tree in front of our house, to compliment the blue spruce tree we have growing on the other side of the driveway. i get it, but i'm not sold, so last night i was looking at things like dwarf boxwoods online.

along with the landscape plan, though, came a price sheet for the plants he recommended ... $3800. just for the plants and trees! labor for them to plant the plants is another $2400. that doesn't include removing the current plants and rocks, or laying a new weed barrier or edging or buying/laying mulch or anything like that. a) he recommended a heck of a lot of plants, and b) i think their prices are a smidge inflated. we stopped at home depot last night, and as i was looking around to get an idea for prices (this was before the nursery's price list came), and i saw an autumn blaze maple, which was a tree he'd recommended for the front yard. home depot's price was $60 - the nursery's price was $450. granted, the nursery gives you a one year warranty with the purchase of their plants (two if you pay them to plant them), and maybe there's a size difference in what you're buying ... but by my calculation, i could buy seven home depot maples for the price of one nursery maple. i'm just saying. so i think we'll be shopping around for the plants we decide to go with for now.