Happy Birthday to Me

Hi there. Yes, it's my birthday today. That'll be fun, I'm looking forward to it. I wanted to update you on what we've been doing this month.

For Christmas, we stayed home, barely did gifts as usual, then a few days after the holiday, we went to a bed and breakfast out in the country and stayed for 2 days. It was very nice, a perfect reset for the new year. We went here: http://www.rose-hill.com/, if you’d like to see pictures.

Also, we just bought a car. It’s been a busy two weeks with all the car buying research and work. I had a Dodge Caravan, and Brian had a Nissan Pickup, a tiny truck. The whole family can’t fit in his truck, which only seats 2 people, so that causes some troubles sometimes. So, we’ve been planning for months now that he needs a bigger car, but we kept putting it off. Then, two weeks ago on Friday night he was driving home from work and someone yelled at him at a stopsign, “can I buy your car?” And no, he didn’t have any kind of “for sale” sign on his car! He just really wanted a small truck and said they are in high demand right now, and he was having trouble finding one. So they pulled over and talked, later that night, we sold him the car and he paid in cash. We were just as shocked as anyone. We'd been meaning to sell the car, but we kept putting it off.

This guy paid just over blue book, which was great. Then we looked a cars for Brian online for a week. Mostly Honda Accords. Brian decided he likes Hondas this time. After a few days of that, I pointed out that after this car for him, that the next car would have to be for me. The Dodge van that I have to drive with the kids is way too big for me, I’m too short for it, and can’t reach things, and the steering wheel hits my legs if I move it low enough for my arms, and I just don’t like it, plus it’s already up to 90,000 miles. I told him after this car, that maybe the next car could be the Honda Odyssey that I want. He said you want a Honda van? Ya. So we looked them up on the used car section of kbb.com that we were using to look at Accords, and it turned out that if you get an Odyssey that is a few years old, they’re the same price as the car we were looking at. Then it was just a matter of fitting two vans in our garage. So we measured it and tested the garage with our Dodge, and they both would fit, so it was done. We would get an Odyssey, then I could get the new car, which is much better for a woman and kids, and he could get the Dodge, which he’s always liked, and which is a safer car, and a car that can travel to San Antonio when we need to. His truck wasn’t trustworthy enough to do that.

All of this internet research we did was in the middle of an ice storm here, in which the whole city shut down for three days because there was ice on every road, and it wasn’t safe to drive. It's usually above freezing here so no one has chains or other preparations to drive in ice. Companies and school districts for hundreds of miles all shut down for three days. Brian was supposed to fly to California for work. That got delayed by a day and some hours, but he finally flew out once the airport received enough de-icing solution. While he was gone, I went to look at the car I’d picked online with the fewest miles and the lowest price. I loved it. The guy wanted to sell it to me, of course. He said “what do I need to do to make this happen”, I told him we had to wait two days until Brian was back in town. Long story short, we bought it on Saturday. Here’s what it looks like:
http://cars.com/go/search/detail.jsp;jsessionid=EDYMDKZG30XOTLAYIEXE2UY?tab=photos&paId=219298718&recnum=&actLog=true&tracktype=usedcc&pageNumber=&numResultsPerPage=&largeNumResultsPerPage=0&sortorder=descending&sortfield=PRICE&certifiedOnly=false&criteria=&aff=national

That’s not the actual car, or the dealer or the year, or anything. It's just the manufacturer's pictures, but it looks like that. Anyway, we’re quite spoiled now, it’s got automatic doors, and a DVD player, and leather seats. I don’t know how we got the price we did