My New Ride!!!!!

If you've been reading for awhile, you know that Luke and I bought a used Volkswagen Passat about a year ago.
A month after we bought it, the engine needed to be rebuilt, costing as much as the car cost us. We could have probably gone to Disney World 3 times with what we paid to have that engine fixed! :-P

And that wasn't all. A few weeks after we got that fixed, the car started smoking profusely whenever we were stopped. Apparently we needed to rebuild the turbo charger, which was not cheap either.

Since we fixed the turbo charger, the car has been back to the shop twice to have little things fixed. Both times, the car was there for about a month, and the tiny little parts that needed fixed cost over $100 both times.

We finally decided that this is no way to live. The car has probably only been running 6 out of the last 12 months. We only put about 2,000 miles on the car the whole year that we owned it, because it was always in the shop! Every part was super expensive, and took forever to be shipped here because it was a Volkswagen. We were just so done with that! Needless to say, I will never own a VW again!!

Yesterday the car came back from the shop. Today Luke took the afternoon off so we could trade it in for a more reliable vehicle. We weren't messing around this time!

We spent 6 hours at the dealership. We test drove 3 cars. And we finally decided on this beauty:
A 2007 Ford Fusion! In perfect condition with only 37,000 miles on it. And I don't know if you can tell by the picture, but it has a purple tint in the sunlight. I'm in love!! It will be so much easier to fix if something does go wrong, and it's still under warranty.

I will be sleeping so much better at night. I'm glad we upgraded to something with so little miles (our Passat had just under 100,000 miles when we bought it). But at least we learned from this experience.

We will have this car for a loooong time after all we've been through. I'm glad it's a large 4-door, because I'm sure we will have at least a couple of car seats in there by the time we decide to get rid of it ;-)

Back to School

On Monday of next week, it's back to waking up at 6:00 AM every weekday. Back to packing lunches of egg salad sandwiches or leftovers. Back to coming home and barely being able to keep my eyes opened, yet having to cook a meal and clean the house anyway. Gone are the days of waking up late and having no schedule. You can see why it's a little bit bittersweet to go back to work.

Last year, during the winter, I got extremely burnt out. I had had enough of my job, and was too tired to do anything at night. I let housework slide, and probably wasn't too pleasant to be around. I really don't want that to happen again this year. I know I always start things with the best intentions, and then have trouble actually following through. But this year I really want to keep my life as organized and easy as possible so I don't get into an awful funk again this winter.

First of all, my crock pot will be my best friend this year. I don't know why I haven't used it much since we've been married. Maybe because of a lack of planning or a lack of good crock pot recipes. However, this year I'm going to really be on the search for great slow-cooker recipes. I'm planning on making my weekly menu and buying ingredients before the weekend, then preparing as many of the crock pot meals on the weekend as I can, then just throwing them in my crock pot before I leave for work in the morning. Not only will that make my life a whole lot easier, but it will also give me more motivation and time to set the table so that we can eat more meals there instead of in front of the TV. This is one of our bad habits that I really want to break! (And I'm using the 1001 day challenge to help me break it).

My mother-in-law was nice enough to pick up a bread-maker for me at a garage sale a few weeks ago. I was so excited!! I still have to figure out how to use it, but once I do, I'm sure Luke's going to have to pry me away from that thing! My mom used to have a bread maker, and she made all kinds of bread, pizza crust, pretzels, breadsticks, etc. with it. I'll definitely be using it a lot to prepare parts of meals ahead of time. I can't wait to get started!

As far as cleaning goes, I'm just going to have to somehow be a lot more disciplined than last year. I might have to make a rule that I can't go to bed with dirty dishes in the sink or something (because dishes are my absolute least favorite thing to do in the entire world! So I tend to avoid them). Or if there are full laundry baskets. I don't hate laundry as much as I hate washing dishes, but it's hard to keep up with it sometimes even just with the two of us!

I have been bad with my devotions and Bible reading this summer. The lack of a schedule really isn't good there. During the school year, I had been pretty good at doing that before work in the morning, so I'm excited to get back into the schedule of that again.

Finally, I had one fun idea to help me keep my sanity this winter (I really HATE winter, to the point of seasonal depression, I think). Luke and I are going to make a list of fun activities for the winter. Like "watch a movie," "go sled riding," "go out to dinner," "Spend a weekend at Great Wolf Lodge," etc. So whenever we are feeling bored or sick of winter, we can go to the list for something fun to do. I even thought of putting each activity on a strip of paper, and then putting them all in a bowl. When we want to do an activity, we pull a strip from the bowl, and we HAVE to do whatever it says. That sounds like fun to me! So we will see :-)

So lets HOPE I can make it more than 2 or 3 weeks using all of these ideas. I really think they will help me to stay organized and have a better school year than last year!

And before I go, here are some pictures of the newest addition to our family. Okay, so it's not a baby or even a puppy, but I do think we will be spending a lot of time with it! It's technically "my" car, because I will drive it to work, but it's nicer than Luke's truck, so it will be the car we drive on long trips, trips to town, and dates, too ;-) I got to drive it home from Cleveland yesterday...it drives so nicely! I kept having to check the speedometer because it felt like I was going so much slower than I actually was. I better watch out, or I might get my first speeding ticket. All I want to do is drive it now ;-) Luke and I have been talking about taking trip to Cedar Point this Saturday, and I think we definitely will now, because it's a chance to drive the car a couple of hours both ways ;-)

Announcement

I like to tease with that title, because as soon as you hear that word, you automatically think someone's pregnant, don't you? lol...I know I do! Well, that's not the case here. But I do have some pretty exciting news!

Last night, Luke and I drove about an hour from our house to go look at a little VW Passat. As soon as we got there, someone was test driving the exact car we had called about! Talk about a bummer. But the man told us he had another Passat...older, and with more miles, but CHEAPER. We went ahead and test drove that one, and tried to make ourselves like it, because it was cheaper, but we just didn't. The inside was all torn up and there were small dents in it. And it had 120,000 miles, just 1,000 less than the car I'm getting rid of!

So we drove back to the dealership, hoping that the people who had driven our dream car had decided they didn't want it. While those people were talking to the dealer, we got our chance to test drive the car. As soon as we sat down we both just got huge grins on our faces. The interior was so nice! There was a moon roof AND heated front seats!! (The heated front seats are probably my favorite part! lol). And there are only 95,000 miles on it. Apparently, Passats are supposed to last forever, so Luke says that's really not that many miles.

We got back to the dealership, and it turns out the people who had just driven our dream car DID want it. However, they didn't have the money for a deposit yet. I felt kind of sneaky and underhanded, but we gave the dealer a big fat deposit in order to hold the car for us. So it's ours!!!

We still have to apply for a loan today (sorry Dave Ramsey. We are bad people, and NOT following your rule about car payments. But it will be paid off soon!) but we should be able to drive the car home by the end of this week.

Luke took a picture with his iPhone as we were leaving. Isn't it pretty?? (We're going to fix/clean the headlights so they don't look so yellow and yucky)

I'm pretty excited that I'll not only have AC and a moon roof in the summer, but I'll also have heated front seats in the winter! It's definitely a few steps up from my 1999 Dodge Neon. I told Luke that now all we need is a garage so it doesn't get all rusty. But maybe by the time we buy our next car, we'll be living in a house with a garage :-)

So I'm pretty proud that the second day of my 1,001 day journey, I was able to cross off a huge item from my list: buy a new (to me) car.

Last night I was also able to work on another item on my list: Eat at 5 restaurants where I've never been. On the way home, Luke and I ate at Sonic. Now, I don't know if this is technically considered a real "restaurant" since it's fast food. But Luke and I have been wanting to eat there FOREVER. For years, we kept seeing mouth-watering commercials for Sonic, and yet we had never actually seen one in real life. There were NONE anywhere NEAR us. We started to wonder if this Sonic place with the hilarious commercials and delicious-looking food was just a myth! That is, until we heard about a Sonic that was being built in a town about 45 mintues from our house. Last night we drove past it on our way home from the car dealership, so OF COURSE we finally ate there! It was pretty good, too! And I'm counting it as a restaurant on my list. One down, four more to go :-)So it's been a good week so far, and it's only Tuesday! I'm glad this fun stuff is happening to keep me in a better, less-stressed mood before the school year starts.