series on breakdowns

The past week was just a series of things breaking down around our house. First our clothes dryer stopping working. I cannot recall the exact date when we fixed it previously, but it was within a few months of the last time we had it repaired. Our house has the worst possible location for a laundry area. I dare not call it a laundry room as it is more like a laundry closet. The problem is that the washer and dryer barely squeeze into the closet. The last time we had problems with the dryer, we shopped around for new ones and none of the ones that are made currently will fit into the closet, so we are forced to repair the ones we have. Soon after our dryer decided to stop functioning, our refrigerator started making scary sounds. It was like a slowly accelerating engine that would then deaccelerate. Up and down it would go all day long. It was especially obvious in the morning when I woke up as it was the only sound in the whole house. Fortunately, we have a really great appliance company near our house who helped us before. For under $200, he was able to fix them both.

Soon after buying our son a car, we heard a sound company from the back end of the car. I called my trusty mechanic to check it out. Both my wife and son complained about the brakes so I had him check those at the same time. Turned out that the brakes all needed changing and the noise was pretty harmless and should some day be fixed when our son gets a job and has money to fix it. At least the brakes are good, which is important for a new young driver!

The last thing to cause trouble was our Windows Vista laptop. For months the family account has had mysterious screens show up when you logged on. I tried downloading a couple of tools from a company called "PC Tools", hoping they would find this virus and kill it. I have Norton Antivirus on this laptop but I just thought I should try something else. After buying a couple of their tools, I was no better off than when I started. In fact a couple of days ago my youngest son informed me when I got home from work that the laptop was frozen. The new tools were complaining about the Windows Defender was running and it could not be running at the same time as these tools. It took me an around an hour to stop Windows Defender. Then the next day that same son told me that a third window was popping up when he logged on. It was in fact getting worse by the day. I had tried to update these tools and it hung the tool and the laptop. This morning I finally removed all of their tools and had to delete our family account and create a new one. For now all is back to normal. In my frustration last night with all of our computers, I decided to buy a new iMac for the family and a new MacBook for myself. I tried Windows for a couple of years and that was all I could take. I am back to an all Apple home again, like the good old days, 10 years ago when I had nothing but Apple machines. It is just not worth the struggle and fighting to have Windows any more.

And the winner is...

South Korea. I should have expected that decision all along. Since my wife was born in South Korea and grew up her whole life there, what other choice could there be? My wife's father has a Hyundai, her sister has a Hyundai and now so do we. It is not like we have plenty of other choices! It really came down to what vehicle cost the least and had the most features and drive the best. We found three different used Hyundai Santa Fe vehicles. I want to saw cars but they are not cars. Some people say they are SUVs, but they are not the typical SUV in size. For now it will have to be vehicle. The nicest thing is they don't drive like an SUV, but more like a car so my wife will enjoy that after having driven our huge Ford custom van for almost 10 years now. I am happy we only buy a vehicle every ten years as the whole process wore me out. I dislike shopping in general but car shopping and messing with car dealers is right at the bottom of my fun list. One last thing I have to comment about. It sure is strange how a Korea vehicle would be named after a city in New Mexico and the similar yet smaller model named after the city where my mother lives in Arizona. Pure intelligent marketing I think.

car dealers

On top of everything else last weekend, we sold our Ford custom van. At a wonderful 14 mpg and the quick rise of gas prices, I just could not take it any more. It a momentary lapse of judgement I told me wife we should take the van to the Wal-Mart parking lot and leave it with a For Sale sign in the window. We sold the van within a couple of hours and so we were down to a single vehicle between us. Not a bad thing, unless you consider the fact that I have to drive to work which is 20 miles away in one direction every day of the week. Since it was late Sunday, we had a couple of choices and decided to try Enterprise Rental cars since they are just down the road a couple of miles. All week long my wife searched the internet for the best car for us. We did not consider a brand new car because of the high price and we do not want to have monthly payments for 5-6 years as that is no fun. Yesterday we checked all of the local small-time dealers in the huge metropolis of Fuquay Varina. One sells high end cars, one sells perfect cars for teenagers which you don't mind if they trash or crash them, one struck me as not very honest, one was from the county of Jordan. Quite a mixture for such a small town. We then ventured outside the town limits to a couple of new car dealers right outside town, as they sell what are called "program cars". These are cars that are owned and driven by dealerships and then sold as used cars. We ended up driving just about every reasonably priced SUV on the market for sale: Ford Escape, Jeep Liberty, Jeep Grand Cherokee, Honda CRV, Nissan Xterra, Mazda Tribute, Toyota Rav4, Hyundai Tucson, and Suzuki Reno. Like my wife said yesterday, there are just too many vehicles to choose from and that makes it even harder. We ventured to the Cary Auto Park in the evening, where there are just about every vehicle brand for sale in the USA can be found. The final place we visited illustrates what I think of dealerships. We drove around most of the dealers looking for the used cars on display in the lots. As we were leaving the final dealer, we saw a nice Mazda Tribute displayed nicely as it was parked on the sidewalk. We went back, which was our first mistake, and asked to drive it. At the big dealerships,someone rides with you from the dealership while you take a test drive. Since the price was too high as said we were not interested. The salesman went inside and said the owner would do something silly to get rid of it as it had been on the lot longer than any other vehicle. I told him I would buy it for $3000 under the price listed right then. He made me sign a paper saying that and ran off to talk to the owner. He came back and told me that was too low. So much for doing anything to sell it!