Stick Shift v Automatic

When I married Chad I had to give "my" car to my younger brother and Chad and I started sharing his car, which was stick shift, which I had never driven before. Chad starting teaching me to drive it and at first I really didn't like it. It took me a while to catch on. Even after I was perfectly comfortable driving stick shift, I couldn't see why everyone always said how awesome it was. Most everyone I know likes to drive stick shift better than automatic because you are more in control, there's more power, it's more fun...I thought I liked automatic better. It's just easier and you don't have to worry about anything. But...then Chad and I totaled our car. The loaner car we had was an automatic. It was so weird going back to driving that. To my surprise, I didn't like it and I missed our stick shift. It just felt weird to drive and like everyone has always said, you just don't feel as in control and it really does feel less powerful. Our new car is a stick shift and I am glad to have it back. I guess I needed to go back to automatic after driving stick before realizing what I really liked better.

Our New Car

It has been an insanely frustrating and annoying hassle, but we finally have a new car. Most of the hassle was working with our insurance because I refused to accept the initial offer they gave me for our old car that was totaled. Most people don't know you don't have to accept what they offer you and you can negotiate with them quite a bit. It took them forever to get back to me any time I tried to negotiate, I think maybe because they thought I would give in or something because we needed a car so badly. But no, Michelle and I held our ground and I am proud to say we won. We actually ended up getting $1,200 dollars more than the first offer he made us. We were finally able to get a check from our insurance, cash the check (which was really scary to have that much cash on hand even for just a couple days), arrange for the guy whose car we bought to bring the car down to Syracuse and have a mechanic check it out, register it at the DMV (I am proud to say that we successfully registered it and transferred the title in one trip to the DMV). Our new car is a 2004 Mazda 3. A testament to the Mazda 3 and how much we loved ours is that that is really the only car we looked for and once we found the right one we bought it. It is two years older than our old one but actually has less miles and is the top of the line model. It's got the bigger engine, a moon roof, 6 disk in dash changer, etc etc and comes in the color that you can only get in the top of the line model: 'winning blue.' We love it. Best of all, we made money off of the whole ordeal because I got more money from the insurance than the new car cost.

Play Him Off, keyboard Cat

There are these hilarious videos I have discovered on the internet that involve something funny or of bad luck happening and a cat that starts to play the keyboard in the middle of the video. I have no idea why but I find them to be very funny. So funny, in fact, that I want to share some of them with the rest of the world. You can google or look up on you tube "Play him off, keyboard cat" and find many of them. And just as a side note, I am only posting the ones with Vice President Cheney and Glen Beck because I think the cat is funny, this has nothing to do with politics...just humor that involves a cute cat playing a keyboard.

Update: pics of totaled car and other info.

We had to go to the body shop to pick up all the stuff that was in our car and this is what it looked like. It was really weird to see the car like this. We got our license plates and all the miscellaneous things that were in the car like our emergency kit. We also of course got all of my car audio stuff. They were nice enough to rip it all out, there really was a lot. There were two large amplifiers, a boat load of wires of all different types and sizes, the box with the two 12'' subwoofers, both 1 capacitors, our Play Station, and lots of other little things. They took all the stuff out and had it waiting in their little warehouse. I asked the guy if he had any idea where I might be able to sale all this stuff because I had no intention of putting it my new car. Lucky me, he told me that one of the guys who helped take out all the stuff of my car had commented that he knew this was a real hard-core system and had something about the fact that he wanted to buy a system. So that kid came up and I asked him if he wanted to buy the system. I had mentioned that I would sale it for like 7 or 8 hundred dollars but luckily the kid recognized that the system was hard core and I was able to get $900 from him. I had no need for the stuff and I wanted to sale it so it worked out really well for both of us because he was about to buy a system on ebay for more money and it wasn't as good as the one i sold him. Here We are still in the process of figuring out how much money we are going to get from our insurance for our acutal car, but so far, since I was able to sale my system this my end up being somewhat of a blessing in disguise. This is a picture of all the stuff we took out of our car.

Update on our car: it's totaled

Yes, that's right, our car is totaled. After we took it to a body shop to get work done and they were finally able to take things apart and find out the full extent of everything that was wrong, the damage continued to stack up and when it reached $10,000 they called us and let us know that it was going to be considered totaled. They are going to give us quite a bit of money though because it was still worth a lot (it was pretty new and had pretty low miles), and in the current economic climate we are hoping we might even be able to actually buy a brand new car from a dealer. I have heard it is a buyer's market wiht dealierships and you can haggle quite a bit. If we are willing to go out on a limb and buy a Chrysler or GM, I don't know if they still honor warranties or not but I bet the dealerships that are clsoing are trying to liquidate their inventory pretty fast! Our insurance is giving us an extra $500 on top of the value of the car for the GPS/DVD player I had in there and I will be able to take my system out and I will just sale it on craig's list as soon as possible because I am not going to bother with putting a system in our new car...I am over having a system. We would rather have a trunk :) So things are all still up in the air right now but that is pretty much where we stand.