I work at home now, so forget about the “long way home”.  But the “after work”, roughly-one-hour route should still be part of my repertoire.  And since the new house is on the south east side, there’s new side-streets to explore!  And although we only moved in last May, I never got around to this kind of thing last year.  :(  I mean, I was busy, but of course I wasn’t busy every single hour.  It should have happened.

But today, it did!  After a nicely productive afternoon and whiltling my inbox down to an amazingly small FIVE messages, I felt like doing something different before I dug back into more hopefully productive stuff this evening.  Well, remarkably, after some rather scary rainstorms this afternoon, the sun came out and it wasn’t even very windy…  It was 6:44, as I recall, but it still seemed light out.  “Oh right!!  Daylight Saving Time!”  So, I decided to celebrate the extra hour of evening sunlight with a spontaneous bike ride.  Finally!

And so, I present my first draft of the first south-east-side “after work” loop.  Only 8.5 miles, so I’ll probably try to have a “longer option” to go for a full hour, especially once I get used to where I’m going.  Today there was a heavy exploration factor, but I was still home about an hour after I had the original idea and got out the GPS, and all the other bike gear…

… and the new Heart Monitor that Pri and I purchased (thanks for the recommendation, Fiona! We love it!). According to it, I burned 627 Calories on the ride.  Based on that and another recent experiment, I’m starting to use 70 Calories per mile as my estimated fuel efficiency. I don’t know how that compares with other bikers, nor do I have extreme confidence in the data that the heart monitor puts out… But still, I’m sure it’s not completely crazy, certainly in the right order of magnitude…  And yeah, I had to pause and thing that when I do serious bike rides like the Hilly Hundred or the big bike ride to Indy I did with Erik years ago, I’m burning multiple thousands of calories. Multiple days of normal eating.  Wow.  No wonder I feel tired.

Not too tired after today’s run.  I should finish this up though so that I can still feel like the whole experience took less than 2 hours.  :)

They didn’t.  Or at least, I don’t think they did.  I don’t really know.  But I did go ahead and create an account. There?  Happy?

So far, it’s overwhelming… which I guess it to expected.  Within an hour of signing up, my inbox had basically only facebook notifications visible in it.  Two full screens of messages, about 35 facebook notifications, and two normal legitimate emails.  Most of these are friend confirmations, so presumably those will die down soon once the initial rush is over.  Let’s hope…

Meanwhile, I find the facebook interface easy enough to use (very impressive how quickly it identified all of these “friends” for me) but… overwhelming.  Right now it feels like 30 of my friends are having a party in the room while I’m trying to work.  Not that I can’t see the attraction, but, at the risk of seeming a 21st century high-tech grumpy old man, I’m closing the window for now.

The walk from my bedroom to my office was far less harrowing.  I did have to walk to the mailbox to send in my estimated tax payments though – Due today, don’t forget all you self-employed people out there!

And my excuse? Well, I’ve been busy….

But really, it’s not exactly the “busy-ness” that wears on me. It’s
the feeling that there are things I SHOULD be doing that I’m not.
that’s something I realized recently as I was bemoaning the fact that
I didn’t have time to do more of the things that I want to do,
including writing in this blog. It’s not that I didn’t have time, per
se, it’s that I had open commitments that made me say “look, if you
have time to blog, you have time to do this other thing, which you
must admit is more of a priority than blogging”. Which, honestly, I
still do, but at least I’ve reached a point where something
substantial is happening with all of the remaining open commitments,
so I’m feeling a bit better, and being that I reached the one year
mark, I figured it was time to do something here too.. and I want to..

Now, I am someone who could probably dive into my memory and write
pretty extensive posts about most everything worth writing about from
this past year, pretty much as if it had just happened. I’d lose a
few details, but, basically, it could be there. However, I don’t want
to spend that much time writing, and I’m sure you don’t want to spend
that much time reading, so… we won’t do that. Rather, I’ll try to
be brief as I present this Year In Review…

On 2007-12-10, I wrote my most recent blog post. The rest of December
was relatively standard holiday madness, mixed with some paperwork
madness (read on…). After celebrating “xmas lite” in Cleveland
(perhaps just as decadent, as if you ordered a 600 calorie dessert at
a restaurant only to find out that that was the reduced-calorie
version), Pri and I flew directly from there to Portland, OR, for New
Year’s Eve 2007. Saw lots of friends I don’t see often, and also
Steven, Kellie, & Hannah. But before the new year could even arrive,
it was becoming clear that my grandmother was going to die soon,
shortly after her 94th (I think) birthday. Steven and I flew back together,
after he pointed out that I booked the wrong return date. Allen
picked us (and, to my surprise, Frank) up in Akron, and we drove to St Marys for the
funeral. Always great to see my family, and this was no exception.
My mom’s words at the service brought everyone to tears. If I gave my
grandmother anything like the tribute she deserves here, this post
would at least double in length. So, I’ll move on…

I then I flew back to Portland, and then drove to Seattle to see Pri sing with Las Tres Gracias. Then back to Portland, where at dinner with Sue and Michael I “formally” proposed marriage to Pri. The proposal was a bit silly, since the plans were all set anyway. But the earrings are nice, and Pri likes them a lot.

Flew back to Cleveland (the car was still there) and told my parents about the marriage plans.
They were surprised and a bit confused, but happy. Drove back to
Cleveland, and started the work year off basically ten days late.
Being self-employed, I keep track of my billable hours to know what my
income is, and starting this late resulted in months of reports saying
that I was behind for the year.

The wedding was a whole week later, so we had time to do a bunch more
paperwork related directly and indirectly to getting married and its
implications for Pri’s residence in the US. There were some social
and familial matters to address mixed in there too. Mostly, though,
it’s pretty easy to get married if you don’t invite anyone. And it
was very nice.

The next day we sent in all of the
immigration-related paperwork to the government, slightly over an inch
thick, I’d say. Then we could get started on the “brochure“. Pri
made this, better than I could have ever dreamt of doing. But I had
to collect a lot of addresses. Wow, that’s a pain. Once those were
in the mail, though, we could go house shopping.

House shopping was fast: working on a bit of trickery to make
searching the local Realtor’s website easier, I ran a test and clicked
on the house we now live in. But, I’m getting ahead of myself, first
we had to put in the offer, which was 2008-01-31, if I’m not
mistaken. Thankfully, the rest of the year was not AS busy as
January, but not exactly calm either.
Moving does not come naturally to my family. It’s not part of our
heritage. Both of my grandmothers lived in the houses in which my
parents grew up until they died. My parents still live in the only
house of theirs I’ve ever known. There have been extremely few sales
of homes among my family members (given that most of us own homes).
So, moving out of my house of 12 years was not easy. Emotionally
somewhat difficult, but practically even more so. Pri and I have
different senses of when some item you’ve been saving is really worth
saving. I successfully “let go” of a lot of things, I’m pleased do
say. And I’m glad for what I held on to. But it wasn’t always easy
getting there. And there was just, plain, a lot of stuff to organize
and move. So, that dominated a lot of time for the next couple of
months. Mixed in with that we also had to make a few trips to
Indianapolis for Pri to meet with governmental officials and such.
That all went fine too. I won the bet with Pri about when her Green
Card would arrive, which was in April, even earlier than I thought it
would.

In May our friends and my parents all gathered together to help clean
out of my old house and move into the new one. Again, it went pretty
smoothly, only one injury scare when Rob almost fell victim to the
Victrola. The stress of seeing all of those boxes reduced once we had
the kitchen to where we could cook out of it. Then we could start on
our bedrooms. But, before we could get very much unpacked, we went to
Brazil, spending a few days in Sao Paulo with Pri’s family and
friends, before driving toward Rio de Janiero on a “trip within a
trip”. While in Paraty, Brazil (a little “historical” port town half way between those
two huge cities) we checked in with Michael V to see if our new
countertops were on schedule to be installed. He said yes, but also
informed us that the storm of a lifetime hit Bloomington in early June
and we apparently took on roughly 2 inches of water in the entire lower floor
of the new house. Remember that a substantial percentage of everything we own
was in cardboard boxes, roughly half of which
were in the basement. An amazing group of our amazing friends got
together and dealt with some of that muck to limit the degree to which
this pile of wet muddy stuff would turn into a pile of wet muddy moldy
stuff. I think I will always feel a bit indebted to them.

Once we returned, we started cleaning. And tried to get back to our
normal working lives, in between cleaning, throwing away more stuff, and dealing with the insurance company. But, surprisingly, I did not have a lot of work
waiting for me. Which made it easy to get distracted by all that house
stuff when I should have been focusing on work. I solved that problem by
signing up for a big new work project in July (The Indiana BizCafe,
which I wrote about on my business site). I’m quite sure I made more
money in July of 2008 than I have in any other month of my life. But,
of course, I did that by working like crazy. And of course, this was
also the month of our house-warming/we-really-did-get-married party.
That was grand fun. But naturally, kept us busy, both before and
after.

As the dust was settling on the BizCafe project and the party (oh, and
the quick trip to Colorado, where I performed the wedding ceremony for
Frank and Sarah!), I think I was entering the malaise of 2008 which (I
hope) I am just pulling out of. Basically, the feeling was that I had
many large commitments that needed to be completed but on which I
terribly behind schedule. This was bad. Almost certainly, part of my
awareness of this was reading a fantastic book called “Getting Things
Done”, which emphasizes awareness of all commitments and practical
approaches to actually completing them. So, being aware of my big
commitments, I started tackling them.  And trying to stop taking on new ones…

One has been a thorn in my side for almost two years: officially
dissolving HoosierNet, Inc. Even though the organization is no longer
functioning, no longer making or spending any money, and really
basically dead, it’s still on the books as an organization. And, for
a small but persistent number of reasons, it cannot easily be gotten
rid of. So, it’s still there. But, with a not-insubstantial amount
of effort on my part and that of many others, there are fewer issues
still remaining… and hopefully we’re wearing down their
persistence. In any event, for me personally, it’s definitely less of
a pressing concern, and the ball is not in my court at this point.

So I could then turn my attention to, say, selling my old house. I
actually had a deal on the table at one point, but after some
questionable interpretations of the language of the contract by the
potential buyer, the deal fell through. I’m not going to get into it
at this point, but suffice to say I was back to square one. Or maybe
square two. My original plan had been to just put up a “for sale by
owner” sign and see what happened. I thought this led to a deal, but
not really. So, then I decided to get more serious and actually do
some stuff to get the house ready for sale. I figured I’d take it
easy on myself and hire someone to do the dirty work. That was
probably a bad choice. All of the contractors I contacted were very
busy (which also explains why we weren’t making much progress on
getting some of the water damage in the new house fixed, although we
did succeed at getting things dried out and cleaned up). Finally I
met with a couple of guys who I clicked well with and who I thought
had a great understanding of how I wanted to approach the repairs.
Sadly, the day that I met them at the house I found a tree on top of
the roof.

Ok, not a whole tree… just the upper half or so. It seems that
Hurricane Ike did a number on one of my trees at the house. I’m
pleased to report that the damage to the roof was actually minimal,
especially given how bad it looked and how bad it could have been.
But, all the same, here I thought this meeting was going to cross
something off the list, and instead it added something to it.

Oh, and the other problem: those contractor guys I clicked with? They
never got around to giving me an estimate. Just too busy, it seems.

I bet you thought that when I said “the other problem” that I was
going to talk about the housing-bust-inspired financial crisis and the
subsequent worst freezing of US’s credit industry since the Great
Depression. Good guess. And that hasn’t made the process of trying
to sell my house any easier.

Meanwhile, the good people at the Bloomington Playright’s Project, to
whom I volunteered my help in late spring so that they could overhaul
their website, were thinking that I really didn’t care about them
afterall. Or at least, that’s how I felt, like they must have thought
that, since I was making so little progress on their project amidst
all of this confusion.

So, I was feeling a bit down on myself, like I must be lazy because
how else could so many of these projects be not nearing completion, as
Priscilla and I drove to Cleveland for my 20th High School Reunion.
The good news about the drive there is that no people were injured in
the accident. The bad news was that my car was totalled. Although,
not until several weeks later, when closer inspection revealed more
damage than previously suspected. Anyway, the basic cause of the
accident is that a reckless driver switched into our lane as if we
weren’t there… which, of course, we were. Several eye-witnesses
confirmed what we perceived, that we were essentially run off the
road. We actually collided with an innocent truck behind us. The
reckless car drove off, although the Police Officer at the scene said
that someone had called the police and tailed the villain until they
could pull him over. So, for whatever that’s worth. He apparently
wasn’t insured, surprise, surprise.

By the way, the rest of the reunion weekend was great. And the rental
SUV my insurance paid for turned out to be pretty handy in hauling the
wood that I chopped off of my old house with my brand-new chain saw.
So, we have a pretty good collection of firewood now. Of course, once
the car was declared a total loss, we had only 5 days to return the
SUV, which meant a blitz of car shopping. Car shopping is in general
not enjoyable. Last time I had no time pressure at all, this time was
the exact opposite. It was not enjoyable. But, I ended up buying a
2007 Ford Focus from a private seller that I found on eBay, and I’m
quite happy with it… moreso than I ended up being with the 2004
Saturn, but that’s another story.

We picked up this new (to me) car in Indianapolis the night before
Pri’s mother arrived for a two week visit. (Thanks, again, Fiona, for
putting us up (again) that night). It was good to spend some more
time with her, and I’m glad she got a good taste of where we live and
why we like it here. Plus, an added bonus: Pri’s brother snuck in a
short visit while he was in the States interviewing for a new job…
So, that was especially fun. And he got the job, so we might be
seeing a bit more of him as he makes occasional trips to the US
headquarters of the company he’s working for now in Brazil. Oba!

Pri’s mother departed Indiana on November 5, the day after Indiana
voted for a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time in my
lifetime (Barry Goldwater was the last Republican presidential hopeful
to lose the Hoosier State). I actually followed the race pretty
closely, in some ways I felt like it was a tether to reality… like
“yeah, if my life were more normal I’d be paying attention to this,
just like I am now”.

Anyway, that practically brings us up to current events. The normal
holiday craziness made sure that I wouldn’t really be able to feel
settled even I was finally starting to get the upper hand on my
responsibilities. But, I still believe that I was making that kind of
progress. My house is due to go back on the market in the next few
days, and next week I’ll meet with the Playright’s Project about
moving from “design phase” to “launch phase” on their new site. And it looks like
we even have someone hired to work on the damage the water did to the
new house. So… good…

And, as I get ready for bed at the end of the first day of 2009, I can
say without hesitation that so far this year has been more relaxed and
less stressful than last year was at this time. I’m hopeful (and
optimistic) that that trend will continue. In which case, you all
should be hearing a lot more from me on this blog. So… Here’s to a HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

Saturday I spent hours taming my inbox. As I discussed last November, I like to have 38 or fewer emails in my inbox at any given moment (because I can fit 37 on one screen), especially at the end of a work day. I marveled then at what an impact the out of control inbox seems to have on my psyche, and the marveling continues. And, when I feel scattered, I never feel like I have time to write to my blog.

This got me thinking: I could develop a Scattered-David index… something like the Index of Leading Economic Indicators, that takes things like how many emails are in my inbox, how long its been since I wrote to my blog, maybe somehow it could track my purchases of plane tickets…. anyway, take raw data like that and compute some “Scattered-David index” that would give friends and family some sense of what’s going on with me when I’m feeling to scattered to post to the blog or what have you. The essential thing would be that it’d have to work without me doing ANYTHING, so I’d have to write a program to see how many messages were in my inbox and stuff, and have these programs run automatically every day or whatever. Once I had the number I could do things like show graphs and stuff.

Fun to think about. If I felt like I had more time to play with things like that, I’d probably give it a try. But, hey, I have to get a lot of work done this week before leaving next weekend for Boston for yet another wedding. I’m hoping things will be pretty calm between my return from that and Thanksgiving. Maybe I’ll even renew my efforts to blog more often. But meanwhile, at least my responsibilities are mostly fun and rewarding!

They’ve got a very impressive wood chipper. Remarkable to see the tree disappear almost as soon as it hits the ground.

Those of you who also read Priscilla’s Blog have already seen the link to all of our pictures. We edited out about half of them, but there are still over 300. But, we’ve got them neatly arranged by place we were at, at there’s thumbnails and everything, so you can actually scoot through them pretty quickly if you, like me, have limited patience for looking at huge collections of photos.

Or you can just get the highlights here! First, that map there shows basically where we went. We flew into Denver, so if you want to follow along on the map (just click it if you want to) start on that side. You can zoom in and see the path with enough detail that you can use your inate-to-humans “snap to road” ability and pretty much know exactly where we went. Or, like I say, you can just look at the whole thing, it gives a pretty darn good overview, just not as cool (read: geeky). (Thanks once again to the amazing Gmaps Pedometer for making such things possible).
I’m not going to type a play-by-play of everything we did. But here’s a text overview, with quick reviews and links to photos:

• Rocky Mountain National Park: We were more impressed than I expected us to be. If you go there, I highly recommend the Mill’s Lake Trail.
• Snowy Range Road: We had a nice campground and a nice scenic drive, neither of which were in our original plans.
• Grand Teton National Park: Amazing mountains, although not a lot of great trails or other things to do.
• Yellowstone: Big and famous, but unlike anything else on Earth
• Arches: From the mountains to the desert, and uncommonly beautiful desert at that
• Canyonlands: It seems like it’s gotta be as big as the Grand Canyon. Probably not, but awe-inspiring and beautiful.
• Manti-La Sal National Forest: Amazing campground on a mountain with amazing views of Canyonlands that sadly didn’t photograph very well.
• Bryce: I can’t think of anything as closely linked to my sense of visual beauty as this park
• Zion: Another home of yet another kind of rock formation. Also home to two unique hikes: Angel’s Landing and The Narrows.

In addition to all of those links to photos, I’ve also got just a couple of google map projections of GPS recordings of trails that we walked. My favorite is definitely this one of the Fiery Furnace in Arches. The rangers warned us that the GPS wouldn’t work in there, which was largely true… but apparently it got enough glimpses of GPS satellites to give a sense of where we went, although I bet a lot of these data points are pretty inaccurate. Still, despite its lack of precision, I love that aerial view of the furnace. And of course, you can zoom in and out and see the whole park from above, if you like.

I also have projections like this one of the Flattop Mountain Trail and the Mills Lake Trail (both in Rocky Mountain National Park) if you (like me) can’t get enough of this GPS/aerial photo stuff. (Thanks once again to GPS Visualizer for making this kind of thing so incredibly easy and so deeply satisfying). (Ok, and yes, thanks also to Google Maps. But unlike the other two things, everybody knows about Google…)
Anyway, as I hope is evident, we saw some amazing natural wonders, and we also had a great time. If all of this isn’t enough detail for you, I’m sure you’ll have no trouble convincing either of us to talk and talk and talk about it, so don’t hesitate to ask — at least, not for OUR sake. :)

Well, from everything I can tell, they no longer manufacture filters that go into my system. Rendering it essentially useless. This is distressing, since I guess I’ll now just throw away this perfectly functional product. At first, though, I thought that it was also unfortunate that I’d need to buy a new system, rather than just the inexpensive filters.

Well, apparently they also no longer make inexpensive filters. Looking at water filters and systems at REI and at Campmor it seems that the systems now cost only slightly more than their filters. For instance, I ended up ordering the Katadyn Hiker for $50. It’s filter is apparently good for about 200 gallons. If I’m worried that that won’t be enough, I can buy a replacement “cartridge” for it for about $40.

It seems, then, that the same thing has happened to these backwoods products as what happened to InkJet printers: the price of the systems has come down, with the manufacturers hoping to make their money on selling the filters. My joke about printers is: “Don’t think of it as buying a printer, think of it as buying an inkjet cartidge subscription”. For me, in the case of the filters, I can’t imagine paying $40 for the filter when I could pay $50 for a whole new unit. But, whatever the case, it seems lame to me. Maybe I don’t understand the economics of it… it’s perfectly possible that the 0.2 micron filters are more expensive to manufacture than the totally macro plastic casing pumps. So, maybe it makes sense. But, I’m more inclined to go with the other idea. If so, they might be pushing it too far. My brand loyalty is not going to be very strong if I can switch to another system for only $10 more than staying with the one I’m buying.

Would love to hear more about this if anyone out there knows anything…

Meanwhile, there’s the van. The van was a gift from my parents, after it got old enough and of questionable enough reliability that they got a new one. It’s been very handy, helping me with several pickups of lumber, furniture, etc. It also helped countless friends of mine move.

But, during its last main job last fall, a scary thing happened. A big part of the suspension jetted up through the floor of the car. Eek! I asked some friends about it and most people thought it would be repairable. I took it to a garage, but they recommended a welder. I took it to the welder, but he said it might not be worth it, the van is old and rusty and it would cost at least a few hundred dollars to repair. I drove away to think about it.

Now, thinking is one of my favorite activities. :) I did some math in my head and calculated, after a while, that, for as little as I drive the van, it’d be cheaper for me to rent a U-Haul all of those times than to continue paying the insurance on it along with these repairs. Less convenient, sure, but still… My line to myself ended up being “if you used the van more often, it might be worth fixing, but since you don’t, it’s not worth it, at least not for you.”

So, long and short, I had two motor vehicles to sell. And, just as I don’t have a great deal of experiene buying cars, I don’t have any experience selling them… The other two cars I’ve owned in my life were junked at the end of their times.

Again, it’s great that it’s so easy to use Kelley Blue Book and similar sites for things like this. The KBB value of my car was $1050-1250, depending on condition, and it definitely isn’t in top condition. So, I was gearing up to try to sell it for about $1000. Turns out that before I even listed it on line, I hear interest from two different friends, and ended up selling it to one of them for $925. Her other car is a pickup, and by our calculations, the Saturn will pay for itself in about 7 months in fuel savings for as much driving as she does. Wow.

But I did eventually get up my courage to list it online. I cleaned it up a bit on the inside (finding all sorts of things (especially cheap kids’ toys) that were apparently left in there when some friend was moving things). I figured I would try on Craigslist first, because it’s free and easy.

A tip for people thinking of listing something on Craigslist: do it when you have some free time ahead of you. Listing this old beast for $200 negotiable, I had two replies the next morning, both of whom very specifically made offers to pick it up THAT DAY. I actually had several meetings and stuff that day, so I had to work to fit one of them in. But, he was flexible, and we worked it out.

He worked as a professional welder in Columbus, IN, and apparently does welding in his spare time as well. So, I think the van is going to a good home. He drove over in his big pickup, pulling a trailer behind him.

I asked if we wanted to test drive it or anything. “Nah” he said “as long as I can drive it up on the trailer, that’s all I care about.” No problem there! So, up it went, he handed me the agreed upon $125, and a few signatures later, the van was gone. So simple.

So, I’m a one car family again! :) I do like the new car, I’m happy about the whole experience. But, as a conclusion, rather than talk about the new car, I want to send a tribute to the old Saturn.

I have an approach to examining car expenses which is to look at the total cost of the car, including repairs (but not including gas or insurance) over the time that you owned the vehicle. I think you do pretty well if you can drive an economy car for $1000/year. So, if you buy a car for $13,000, never put any serious repairs on it, and it lasts for 13 years, you did well. If you buy an old car for $1000, put $2000 of repairs into it over three years, you did well. Or, if you buy a used car for $9000, drive it for two years with no repairs, and sell it for $7000, you did well.

Well, if I recall correctly, I bought the 1994 Saturn for $5500 in December, 1999. Over eight years later, I sold it for just over $900, so I my net expense was $4600. That car barely needed any maintenance. In fact, a year or so ago, I finally had a bunch of the preventive maintenance type stuff done on it, figuring that it had been at least seven years since it had any of that done. So, maybe I did $1000 of repairs over that eight years. Even at a full thousand, though, the total cost of ownership would be $5600 over eight years, an average of under $700 per year. And never once did it fail to get me where I wanted to go. That car served me extremely well, and it is just a bit sad to see it go. Of course, since I sold it to my friend, I’m hoping I can watch it continue to serve someone well for at least a few more years. Thanks, y’old Saturn…

Before I left the dealership, I talked for quite a while with Maggie, who does all of their financial stuff. She’s also the daughter of the owner. I would guess that this place has only 6 full time employees. But I digress. Maggie was very helpful. I haven’t bought cars all that often in my life, so I was unsure about lots of things like whether I get the insurance first or the plates first, etc. She was very helpful, both giving official rules and friendly advice. This was nice.

It was curious, though, how we dealt with the deposit. I asked “How much should I leave for the deposit?” “Well, we really like at least $300, but we could go lower if you need. What’s comfortable for you?” Mercy. I explained that I just didn’t have $9000 sitting in my checking account, but that I could easily offer $1000, and wouldn’t that be a nice easy number? Needless to say, they were fine with that, and we ran $1000 on my debit card.

But in the spirit of asking questions, I also said “now, for the final payment, I should bring… what? a cashier’s check?” That was acceptable, she explained, but posed its own problems. If nothing else, they wouldn’t hand over the title to the vehicle until the cash was in their bank, so I’d either have to come back to pick it up, or they could mail it. “But the mail is not always as reliable as you’d like it to be.” She made it pretty clear that her preference would be for cash. But she certainly wasn’t insisting. But it did make sense to me to have the title and be done with the whole process. So, I figured I’d try to bring cash.

Now, it turns out that only a month or two before this, I actually did have over $9000 in my checking account. After a fair amount of deliberation and consultation with friends, I’d moved just a bit more than that from my checking account to a savings account with ING (4.5% on a plain savings account… I definitely recommend it). Of course, when I did that, I wasn’t thinking that I was about to buy a car. So, now I had to move it back. This is a simple enough process, but it does take a couple of business days. So, that was the real cause of the delay.

I paid the deposit on Monday. I arranged to pick up the car on Friday (Priscilla agreed to drive my old car back for me. Thanks, Pri!). But, I was getting closer and closer to having to face the prospect of dealing with that much cash.

I’m sure this is normal for some people. Even some people who aren’t gangsters. But it’s definitely not normal for me I learned. I was very anxious about it. I mean, I enjoyed it as an experiment. But the results of the experiment were definitely that I was anxious. I decided on Friday morning I should call the bank and make sure there were no special requirements to withdraw that much cash. The person who took my call did have to put me on hold and ask someone, but confirmed that yes, I could just go up to a teller, present them with a check made out to “Cash”, and they could give me the cash.

Ok. Naturally I wanted to do this right before we left. I didn’t want to have all that cash any longer than necessary. I walked through the process several times. I had a list in my brain of exactly what I would do. So, it was easy enough to do the mechanics of it, which allowed my brain to spin on things such as whether any hoodloms were taking note of what I was doing, ready to jump me between here and my car.

I entered the bank. I was glad it was cold, because I wore my winter coat that has a nice inside breast pocket. I walked up to the little work area with the plastic date-on-display and the pens-on-leashes. I took out my checkbook and wrote out the check for $8487.00. Eight Thousand Four Hundred Eighty Seven — DOLLARS. IN the memo field I wrote “I’m buying a car” in hopes that the teller and I wouldn’t have to talk very loudly about the amount.

I waited in line, thinking that at this point, I was still safe. Not only did I not have the cash yet, but someone would have had to have been snooping on me really closely to know that this wasn’t an every-day transaction. Then it was my turn. The tellers at my bank are invariably friendly, and so I wasn’t at all surprised by the warm greeting mine offered. “A rather special withdrawal today” I said as I cooly handed her the check. “OH! You’re buying a car!! Oh that’s great! What kind of car!!” So much for that idea. We chatted a bit about the whole thing. And then she explained that she’d need to meet with a bank manager and go back to the vault to get the money. Makes sense, I’ll wait in the lobby.

As I type I realize that I’m probably just outing my naievety to the world, because I’m sure many people go through this kind of thing more often than I do, but whatever. After sweating for a few minutes (not wanting to remove my coat that would soon be holding so much value), I saw my teller return from the vaults. I met her back at the counter, and she started her work:

1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9- One Thousand

1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9- Two Thousand

The cash was wrapped in packages of $2000 each, so she counted out four of those (does it have to be so loud?), and then the remaining $487, which by that point seemed like pocket change. I had brought an empty plain brown envelope with me to carry this around in, so I put it all in there, and cautiously left the building.

My reasoning was that the walk from the teller to the car was the time to be most cautious. Once I’d driven away, someone would have to be following me to know what was going on. But here, anyone might have been able to overhear.

Well, naturally, nothing bad happened, I drove to the practice rooms at the School of Music to pick up Priscilla. I listened to her play through something on the harpsichord, sweating the whole time (not wanting to take off my coat).

But, all that anxiety was either unnecessary or did its job, because nothing else unusual happened. Maggie at the car dealership was very comfortable dealing with all that cash, and of course, once they had it, I was just a few signatures away from driving away in my new car!!

And so I did. It was a nice day for a nice drive, and I greatly enjoyed cruise control and an open sun roof, both firsts for me on a car that I own. Woohoo!

So, is this the end? No! I now have three motor vehicles! I gotta deal with that fact and several other things. You will be able to read about it all in part three of Car: The Mini-series.