Sheep Guarding Llama

Today really kicks off the holiday weeks for me.  I’ll be behind on SGL until the new year.  This is our big travel week so we leave for New York in two days.  Not much to report today.  Went into the office.  Did some work around the house.

It will be very short posts for the next two weeks.  See y’all in 2011!

Brian came over today and the big project is to see if we can get at least one run of Ethernet run from the garage over to my temporary office on the far side of the house.  That meant that much of the day was spent up in the attic.

What a disaster the attic is.  There are tons of holes going to the outside, many large enough for small animals to be using them, tons of garbage like lightbulbs strewn about in the destroyed insulation, bad wires and old cabling just everywhere and no clear way to get around up there safely.

It was a bit of a project but luckily Brian knows data cabling and we got a run of CAT5 run over to the office which is a pain as there is no straight roofline from the garage to the office in the second bedroom.  Finally we can set up the desk and desktop in there.  What a difference that is going to make.  I’ve been living off of a laptop at the bar in the living room for weeks now and it is killing me.  My feet hurt, my back hurts and getting work done is impossible.

Now I have my phone and desktop… life will be much better.

Today is one of the very first days that I have actually had to “be” in the new house.  So far almost every day was either something crazy going on, people staying at the house with us or me at work all day.  This weekend is my first, and last, chance to really just “be in the house” this year.  We leave for New York on Wednesday afternoon so this is truly my last shot to spend time in it this year.

Today is also our first time getting to actually see our new Acadia in daylight.  Pretty nice having a shiny new car sitting out front of our shiny new house.

Souder came over today and we did some investigating into the electrical system to see what needs to be done.  There is a lot that needs to be accomplished in order to get just some basic data cabling into the temporary office and future nursery.  Until that is done, though, it is nearly impossible for me to do any work at all in this house.  And until we wire our bedroom we can’t even stream movies there from our own, in-house storage system as the wireless is too weak by the time that it reaches that far.

We did very little today.  It was mostly a day to relax.

Went to the office this morning.  We are hoping to hear something about the car this morning although no one called me.  I went home for lunch, still no call.  Didn’t find out anything until after lunch was over and I went back to work.

They called from the second dealer to tell us that while we could get the car they could not do anything about the insanely low value of our trade in and on top of that they would need around seven thousand dollars of down payment.  Ugh.  The main reason that we were looking into doing the car now rather than the middle of next year was the awesome financing now with the zero down and no payments for four months deal that GMAC has on right now.  If we have to put even one thousand down it effectively destroys the reason for us trying to get this deal – that is to alleviate the financial stress caused by having the two houses and the apartment at the exact same time.  So that is a no go.

Later in the day I got a very apologetic email from the first dealer.  They had dealt with the web designer and the web site no longer had the wrong hours on it and they had worked out all of the financing and had sweetened the pot a bit.  Somehow, even though they too were using GMAC, they were getting us the deal that we wanted, supposedly.  How this was possible I have no idea.  But given that the second dealer wasn’t an option at all and we are a little bit panicked about what to do about a car as we will be in no better shape in the middle of next year than we are now I decided that I had better go in and talk to them about it and see what we are able to do.

So after work I drove up and went to the original dealer.  They had the financing all ready with everything that we had asked for.  We got the zero down, the zero percent and the no payment for four months.  Yesterday they had tried to tell us that it was only available for three months.  Today, that was fixed.  The price of the car had come down almost two thousand as well in the mean time and they threw in a free oil change to apologize for the misunderstanding.  Unlike the second dealer who would have had to have traded for the car, this dealer had the car on the lot, all ready to go.

So I decided to just get the car.  It fixes a lot of things both logistically and financially.  So now we own a brand new 2011 GMC Acadia SLE in Summit White with the towing package (we didn’t want the towing package, it just came on the car that met our criteria.)  The car had just fifty-four miles on the odometer when they turned it over to me.  The only extra option that I went for was the GMPP 5 year / 100K warranty and protection plan.  As we are financing the car for a very, very long time it seemed prudent.  There is no way for us to trade this in anytime soon.  This is a pretty big investment for us.

This car is our first with OnStar or with an XM Satellite radio.  We will see how these work out for us.  The car has no GPS which I am very disappointed about as I really like having a GPS and especially the live map feature while driving.  But we do get turn by turn directions with the OnStar and both of our phones have mapping and GPS features so we aren’t without options while driving.  I only use the GPS occasionally and we do have a third party Garmin to use as well when it is needed.

Dominica was pretty surprised when I pulled up out front with the Acadia.  She had no idea that I would be able to come home with the car tonight.  She didn’t even know for sure that I was buying it.  She really wanted to get it but we were really nervous about spending all of that money.  But if we don’t get it I am not sure what we will do once the new baby arrives.  So I just decided that having that stress taken away was important given that she is pregnant and will obsess about it if I don’t just deal with it.

Dominica was sitting on the bed with Liesl watching television when I popped in and tossed her her keys.  She was confused for a minute before she realized that they were GMC keys.  Since I didn’t have the X3 with me to trade in she really couldn’t figure out what had happened and where the Mazda was.  I had just left the Mazda there and will get it tomorrow morning when we drop off the X3 and the title.

So for our first night out we took the Acadia and drove out to Denny’s for dinner.  Liesl was very excited to have the new car and to get to go to Denny’s.  She loves their ranch dressing.

So the search for a new vehicle is over.  We are now, much more than before, suburbanites.  In just a few weeks we went from renting in the heart of Las Colinas to owning a little 1970’s suburban house in the most quaint suburban neighbourhood and from driving a BMW with no space to driving an eight passenger family cross-over made in America (Lansing plant.)  (It is an eight passenger vehicle but we got the seven passenger option which is vastly more useful.)

Tomorrow Souder is coming over and we are going to start doing some work on the house so that we can really start to get some use out of it.  Not having a way to use my desktop is pretty much a non-stop disaster that needs to be addressed rather quickly.  If we don’t get that desktop up and useful I might never manage to get any work done!

We are very excited to have the new car.  That was a large point of stress in our lives.  Having it in time to drive to New York for Christmas is great too.

We got up early this morning so that we could run over to our local GMC dealer to see about taking advantage of GMC’s current “no payments till spring” sales event.  We have been wanting an Acadia for some time and this could be perfect.  With the baby on the way we are in a bit of a panic because once the little one arrives we will literally not even fit in the X3.  Not having a vehicle that can carry all five of us (Oreo included) is a pretty big deal.

We ended up waiting for forever and didn’t really get any information on the financing.  The dealer does have a car that we want on the lot but we waiting for an hour and a half and in that time they were not able to figure out the financing so we had to go as I had an eleven o’clock meeting.  It was pretty frustrating to wait that amount of time and get absolutely nothing done.  We didn’t need to look at cars, we already knew what we wanted.  We told them that we just had to find out about the financing when we first walked in the door.  We couldn’t have handed them an easier sale – except, of course, when I bought the original Mazda PR5 in 2001.

So we went home carless and without any information about whether or not we will be able to get one.  We did find out that the BMW had had an accident back in 2008 before we bought it of which we were unaware.  That sucks as it brings down the resell value.  We also found out that we are three thousand more underneath the BMW than we had thought.  Ouch.  We thought that we were in bad shape but it is actually much worse than we had anticipated.  Ugh.

I worked from home through lunch then went into the office for the afternoon.  It wasn’t until late in the day that we found out that we had been “approved” for the car.  But we had no idea what they meant and never got additional information.

I got home but Dominica was asleep until around six thirty.  So when she woke up from her nap we tried to go find out more about the car.  It turns out that the sales department closes at seven.  At seven, really?  That seems crazy early to this New Yorker.  How can anyone get to them after work if they want to buy a car?

Dominica looked on the website and saw that the finance department was open until eight.  So we called to be sure but at two minutes past seven the phone just rang and rang without anyone answering.  Dominica assumed that they were closed but I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt and drove over there assuming that their phones were not working properly.

Well I got over there and found the gates down and the lights off.  I was not happy.  That’s a lot of driving and calling and effort for them to close early and not be open when posted.  They could have sent the details via email and we could have made a good decision about all of this this afternoon.  Now we aren’t sure what to do but overall we are not too happy with how the car shopping went today.

I got back home and we decided to run over to a GMC dealer in Grapevine who is open until nine.  If our business isn’t worth being open for, we’ll try somewhere else.

It was after eight when we got over to the other dealer.  We walked in and explained that we just needed to find out about the financing, trade in and other financial information.  They were very nice and very quick running us through all of the details.  They couldn’t get the final numbers tonight but the one thing that they were able to tell us was that they were only able to give us much less for the BMW than the first dealer was going to give us.  Over two thousand less!  More details tomorrow.  So we will wait until then to find out what is going to happen.

On the way home we hit McDonald’s for dinner.  We are getting anxious about getting a car as we really need one come April and if we can’t get one now because of how much underneath the BMW we are we are not sure what we are going to be able to do in April.

Well, we had been excited that we were going to get to bring home a new car today.  Looks unlikely that we will be able to afford a new car at all at this rate.  The BMW definitely did not work out well for us.  It will be a while before I look at a BMW again, I think.