Our new addition

It's a new year, so theoretically this blog post should have something about goals for the coming year, be upbeat, positive, etc., etc. But instead, I'm going to tell you about Kevin's car. It was a 2004 PT Cruiser. It has had a lot of problems in the past, and he's poured a lot of money into it. It stopped running last week, so it sat in the driveway until we took it into the dealership for a diagnostic. The result? About $4000.00 worth of repairs; the transmission, timing belt, and a whole host of other things. Getting it fixed was pretty pointless--I don't believe in throwing good money after bad. So, we spent New Years Eve shopping for a new car. We got one, a Jeep Liberty that can go off-roading for Kevin's camping fun. But it is nice and "zippy," as the salesman called it. We got in our new car to go to a party at Vanessa and Robb's that night and it wouldn't start. The battery was dead. It would not charge, and just clicked. I was so MAD! When we test drove it, it worked fine, we saw the paperwork that a full inspection had been run on the car fairly recently. We had a lemon battery. We took it back the next day, and the sales guy was falling all over himself with apologies and explanations. Basically he wrote out an IOU for us to take the car in on Monday morning to get a new battery at no charge, and we are also going to insist on a new diagnostic being run on the whole thing. I hate car shopping; I think it might be the only type of shopping I dislike. And this little episode only solidifies that dislike. But we have a new car. It will get us where we need to go and Maggie likes it. She's been for a couple of rides and is enjoying the space. It just needs to get fixed.