Smelly Used Car Salesman

Yeah, I'll get to why this is titled what it is in a minute. Today is Halloween, and we are taking the kiddos to our friend's house to walk around their neighborhood. We had planned going our our new neighborhood, but we'll do that next year. Only problem is we bought a lot of candy.. hopefully the kids are still out in our neighborhood after 8:30pm. I have been attacking the Sour Patch Kids, damn good! Holden is a Sheep, Larry is a monkey, Pearl is a Princess, & Delilah is a lion (I'll put up pictures tomorrow, honest).

I bought a 22" wide screen LCD for the computah yesterday at lunchtime, less than 24 hours later and the damn thing is already out for delivery according to UPS tracking... talk about a quick turnaround. It's great to have the best online computer parts warehouse only 3 hours away. Now it will be a little less painful when I'm working with long video-editing time lines in Adobe Premiere & After Effects.

Finally got my business registered with the State of Maryland and was able to deposit all these checks I had that I've been carrying around with me for the past 4 months because they were written out to the "company" (that didn't "officially" exist yet). I can't think of anything worse than trying to deal with any State or Federal government agency... such a pain.

So yeah, anyway... we went to look at some mini-vans (welcome to nearing middle age Daddom & Soccer Momness). We look at nearly every van they had on the lot, nobody asking if we need help or bugging us about anything, it was great. We find a couple that are really nice for pretty decent prices. We are not planning on getting one too soon, but we saw what we could afford and we were a little excited about getting one in the next year or two. Before we could get by the front door the oldest, smokyest old used car salesman snags us. Asks us if we want to get one and take a test drive. I'm figured why not, we are already here... maybe we could get one sooner than we think if the price is right and they treat us fair on our trade (har!). We check one out and I take it for a test drive, nice van.. good shape, low miles. I wanted to make sure it wasn't owned by a smoker... but that was impossible cause the Used Car Salesman was a chain smoker and the car filled with his smoke when he lit one up right next to me and my family.

Right about then is when we were pretty much not going to buy from this guy. Common sense would dictate that you do not smoke around a young family with 4 children under the age of 3 and you definitely don't get the smoke in a car they are potentially gonna buy.

To cut out the middle and go to the end. We let them work up an appraisal of our Expedition. The guy tries to get us to put pen to paper before telling us what our trade is and before we haggle on price. Maria asks him what the trade-in value of our truck is... we are floored. We basically just get up and walk out... no need to haggle here... it's late on a weeknight and we didn't really even want to go through all this in the first place.

Moral of the story is don't smoke if you work in sales and don't even bother trying to help us if you wanna take advantage of people like that.

I Gots Da Powa

I got a 30GB Zune a few days ago... love it. I got one for Maria too for Christmas. Holden has his official first day of Pre-K today.. he's as excited as a monkey eating pringles. Maria might take some pictures and I might post them if I think about it later. Until then, tootles

Reel Big Fish

No, nothing to do with the prominent ska band of the 90's.

Holden had his first day of pre-K today.. and seemed to really enjoy it. It was an open house so Maria & I and all the kids were there with him to check it out.

Just a few hours ago during our talk about your day and pray routine I asked Holden if he liked the Guneia Pig and the Goldfish in the aquarium. Holden shot back with "no daddy, those were real fish"... took me a few seconds, then I realized that the only thing that he knows called goldfish are these

They Need To Make Digital Cameras Out Of Kevlar & Granite

We have kids.

We want to be able to catch those "kodak moments".

We have kids.

We have kids who get a hold of things they shouldn't.

We have a digital camera.

We have kids who got a hold of our digital camera.

We need to buy a new digital camera.

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Also as a footnote... I think Maria is going to be deaf (or death, if you asked Davey) by the age of 30. She plays things at very high levels, like NPR and various other audio that litter our hard drive. Well, she called me today to tell me our computer speakers blew out today as well. I almost pulled the trigger on a nice 2.1 channel Logitech computer speaker set a few mins ago, but I think i'll wait and use my old set of speakers I got hidden away in my computer parts box. Suffering will make the new speakers that much more appreciated.

*Note To Self*

Never jump up on Danny Bonaduce and dry hump him... ever

Great news for Everett

Many of you may have heard this already, but Kevin Everett (the football player that was feared paralyzed) now has movement of his arms & legs. Check out this amazing footage of him just the other day.