Now I have some time to talk about the car buying.

On Saturday we decided to head over to the Toyota dealership where we got the Rav4. They were having a big sale, the whole employee discount thing on Toyotas, plus “extra savings and low financing.” We figured we should check it out, even if we weren\u2019t planning on buying just yet.

It was awful. We got there and put our names on a list to be helped; while we waited we went out in the parking lot to check out the cars. For a large dealership their selection for small cars was pretty lousy, most of them were loaded with silly options. They had about a half dozen Prius\u2019 on the lot, so it\u2019s good to know there isn\u2019t a 6 month wait to get one, too expensive though. Eventually we found a 5-speed Corolla that was pretty basic, and an hour after we got there we were finally helped by a sales guy.

The sales guy fell into all the stereotypes of high-pressure dealership sales guys. Making comments about how great the Corolla is, and how great our current car is, asking us where we were from and digging up knowledge about those places so we would feel more comfortable and let our guard down. Michael test-drove the car, and that went well, it\u2019s not a bad car.

Then we went into the negotiations. We certainly had the advantage, we didn\u2019t need the car that day, and it was very easy to just walk away from an offer if it was lousy. As usual, the sale flier was misleading, and the deals weren\u2019t nearly as good as they claimed, at least not on small cars, I\u2019m sure they took a few grand off the gas-guzzling SUVs that they can\u2019t get off the lot otherwise. We went through and got a quote with monthly payments. Egads it was high! I don\u2019t know what percentage they were basing the quote on, but it was way too high. We left, but not before looking up the address for the Limerick Honda dealership on the Toyota dealership\u2019s computer (burn!).

It was 4pm by this time; we had wasted our day at the stupid dealership. It was hot and humid, and I wasn\u2019t much in the mood for more stressful car shopping, but since the day was ruined anyway, we figured we should check out the Honda dealership.

What was my first impression of the Honda dealership? This place is a dive. But they had a lot of cars, tons of Accords, plenty of Civics, hardly bigger vehicles. At this little dealership they had a better selection than at the big Toyota dealership! We browsed, saw a couple of the new Civic Hybrids, drooled, and in all we liked what we saw. When I came across the car we ended up buying I called Michael over and we went inside to speak with a salesperson.

We were helped by a sales-woman named Susie. She\u2019d been working at the dealership for over 8 years (not the kind of thing you see at the high-pressure places, the turn-around there is months rather than years). And she was really upfront with us. We got a quote within a matter of minutes, adjusting down payment and things to get different quotes was handled quickly and professionally. I was impressed. Even more impressed at the price. The price of the Civic was actually higher than the Corolla, but the payments were significantly lower for the same payment period. After some negotiating we were at a price we were all happy with.

It was a very pleasant experience. She told us that they “can\u2019t afford to piss people off” and that buying a car shouldn\u2019t be a tricky game, it should be fun. I was happy to hear such things from a car sales-person, especially when I see the truth in the price and experience. It was late Saturday evening by the time we left the dealership, we had to wait until Monday to sign the final papers and get all the financial stuff in order.

So what happens on Monday? The big Toyota dealership calls and leaves a message on our answering machine “Sorry for not being able to make a deal on Saturday, the response from our employee discount was much more than we expected, but if you call us back we have some great news for you!” Hah! Tricky games!

What also happened on Monday? We got to pick up our new Civic.

The insurance is changed, the papers are signed, our new baby is home.

It’s the 2005 Value Package 2-door Honda Civic, a very car car. Exactly what we wanted, no frills commuting car. Manual transmission, which I’ll need to learn how to drive, so Michael’s going to be the primary driver for now. I get the Rav4, woo!

We got it at Piazza Honda in Pottstown (on Ridge Pike, I’d call it Limerick, but apparently it’s Pottstown). It was a great buying experience for once, I’m so excited %D We finally have two cars! I can drive myself to work now! Yippee!

I haven’t been posting much this week. Nothing I’ve been thinking about is quantifiable yet. I’ve tried to start writing about it but then it comes out wrong. And it takes time to organize thoughts that have been bouncing around in your head without leaving anything important out.

So instead of trying to sort that out, I’ll just talk about my evening friday.

Michael picked me up from work and we went to find a restaurant bar where a bunch of guys he used to work with were having a happy hour. We got lousy directions and ended up getting lost, but so did Bob, when we called him up asking for directions he was lost too, just one street down from us. After calling a guy at the happy hour to get better directions, getting turned around, looking at a map, we finally made it there around 6:30.

We had a nice time, I met some people Michael used to work with who I had never met before. I think next time we do this sort of thing I’ll bring a change of clothes, sitting outside in the summer in my work clothes is no good. I met some new interesting and smart people, which is something I haven’t been doing much lately. Around 9 we decided to leave and find a place to eat (they had food there, but the place was a bit of a dive).

So Bob, Michael’s former co-worker Kirk, Michael and I decided to find some place to eat. Bob suggested we go to Doylestown, find a place to park and walk around to find a place to eat. So that’s what we did.

When we got there I saw a witch. Not some goth girl dressed up, a real halloween decked out chick in a pointed hat. “Oh neat, there are witches in Doylestown” I said to myself, puzzled. Then we saw some kids dressed as witches! Hmm… it’s not Octobe.. OH HARRY POTTER COMES OUT AT MIDNIGHT! Yeah, and Doylestown had a cute little bookstore that was selling it at that time, there was a big ole line outside the store.

We ended up eating at The Knight House. It was a nice place, fairly upscale. They had A/C and Guinness, which were my two requirements for a dining place that night. We all had a nice time talking, I finally stopped being shy and talked a bit. Unfortunately their signature dish the “Knight’s Tower” that we ordered wasn’t so good. It was a “tower” of seafood, but I don’t think my tastes match what their master chef’s are, so just about every mixed salad type thing on the tower didn’t taste very good to me. They even ruined the lobster claws! Still, the fish that they didn’t touch (crab legs, shrimp, oysters) were good.

It was almost midnight when we left, close to 1 am when we got home. It was a good night.

The rest of the weekend has been good too, but I am keeping the details of yesterday secret until all the papers are signed Monday evening *excited*

It’s the 13th of July. Happy I have Health Insurance again day!

Now I can go to the eye doctor, and the dentist, and all sorts of fun stuff.

Oh I hate the dentist %(

I was so tired this morning that I put on the wrong shoes (old sneakers instead of the nice shoes I usually wear).

Best of all, I didn’t notice until just now.

One day we were driving and I saw a Lukoil gas station. Lukoil? Who the heck is that? I didn’t think much of it.

Then saw another.

And another.

They were popping up everywhere, seemingly overnight! It started to get really weird.

When I mentioned it to Michael, he speculated that they were the big Russian company, and that they seemed to be replacing the Mobils.

So this morning when I got up I had a little talk with Dr. Google.

Michael’s speculations were absolutely correct.

Lukoil Replaces Mobil Stations in Philadelphia Area

Red-and-white gas stations are popping up everywhere, displacing one of America’s most familiar brand names in the Philadelphia area.

Lukoil does not own all the sites. It supplies about 470 under contract with independent dealers.

Well, we didn’t end up going to see March of the Penguins, Michael got stuck doing work. It sucked, much moreso for him than me, of course. We’re thinking that we might go down to the city sometime this week after work, shouldn’t be difficult to make it to a 7:20 showing and get home at a reasonable time.

So instead of seeing penguins I grabbed R2Q5 (450mhz test machine), brought him downstairs (Michael was working upstairs) and reinstalled Ubuntu on it. The CD-ROM died halfway through the install, AGAIN. It just does that sometimes, and until now I thought it was the drive. Usually I just turn off the computer and in a couple hours it magically works again. But this time I didn’t want to just sit around for 2 hours, so I unplugged the cables from the drive, and took the drive out. Then put it back in. Still not working. Then I unplugged it from the motherboard and plugged it back in. It worked! Now, since I’ve had similar issues with other drives in the past, I think it might be a motherboard problem. Not surpising, since the motherboard sucks, but it’s annoying. Silly old machine. *pats R2Q5*

So I watched 101 Dalmatians and eventually got Ubuntu installed from the new Hoary disks that I got in the mail. The install went well enough, apt got a little funky, but I think I managed to solve that just by doing what the error messages told me to do. It all seems to be working now. And now I’ll be able to better help those people new to linux who I keep telling to use Ubuntu %)

In the late evening Michael decided to take a break from working and we went out grocery shopping. Spent a couple hours doing it, as we needed to go to the normal grocery store and the Whole Foods market to get everything we wanted/needed for having Michael’s family over today.

We didn’t get home until after 9pm, neither of us were very hungry for dinner so we just steamed some clams that we bought and had them with bread and some melted butter and oil. Yummie!

After dinner we cleaned. Serious cleaning. The kitchen from top to bottom, Michael tackled the bathroom and laundry room. It was almost 1am when I finally crashed into bed. But the house looks great %) Now just need to clean up the TV room, where I’m sitting now with R2Q5, it looks pretty messy.

This morning I finally took the time to review Carla’s Linux Cookbook. Which, if I haven’t mentioned before, is a great book. You can see my review here. And now hopefully the folks at O’Reilly will be happy for another couple of months, I’ve been so bad lately about writing reviews %\ I also post my reviews to my Blogger book review site, so when I was browsing old reviews this morning I noticed that the author of Learning Perl had commented on one review, thanking me for recommending it (the review wasn’t even for his book, it was for Perl DBIbut I mentioned Learning Perl as a good book to use when learning perl). Cool.

This afternoon Michael’s parents, his brother, his brother’s wife, and their two young kids are coming over. Only Michael’s mother and brother have seen the house, so we’re looking forward to showing it off to the rest of the family. And it’s beautiful out today, so we’re doing the BBQ thing, with snacks that I thought the kids would like too (something Michael kept forgetting “we need soda? we need chips? we have cheese and beer!” “kids don’t eat cheese and beer” “Gah! Kids!”)

Now I should probably stop playing around and finish up cleaning, and put R2Q5 back upstairs where he belongs.

March of the Penguins opens today in Philadelpha. I was excited to go tomorrow with the usual friends, but they all suck (hehe) and are busy. I can’t believe they are too busy for penguins!

The only place it’s playing at is the Ritz 5 at 214 Walnut street (see here). The showtimes are 1:20, 3:20, 5:20, 7:20 and 9:20. If the weather is decent we’ll probably be taking a train down and walk to the theater for a 1:20 or 3:20 show, maybe get some food down there too.

Anyone want to come with?

Come on, I know I have lots of Philly area friends who we never hang out with.

Join us for penguins!

I went to my first sweat lodge last night. Michael picked me up from work and we drove down to Malvern to get there a little before 7.

As a whole it went well, I was being my usual “anxious and not talking” thing that I do whenever I am around a lot of people I don\u2019t know, but everyone seemed nice, and I was OK. I think the final number of people in the lodge was 24, which made us a bit squished, but apparently the more people in the lodge, the less you feel the heat, and their record was 27.

After 3 rounds we all left the lodge to lie down on the grass for a bit, and I decided not to go back in for the final round, it was getting a bit hard for me to breathe in there and my body said “enough!” Surprisingly it wasn\u2019t as exhausting and dehydrating as I expected, it was actually quite refreshing. Hopefully I\u2019ll be able to make it through the entire time next time we go.

When everyone was out of the lodge we got to swim in their big pool. That was nice, I love pools and it felt so good. We all then got changed out of our lodge clothes and ate food that everyone brought. A numerologist was there, and offered to give Michael a free reading because it was his birthday, which was fun (even if it was mostly inaccurate).

Toward the end of the evening Michael asked if I wanted to speak with the lodge owner about his upcoming shaman course. Michael is taking the course and when he expressed my interest to the owner the owner said he\u2019d like to meet me. Now of course I\u2019m mad shy, and walking up to someone I don\u2019t know to talk to them is not the sort of thing I\u2019m comfortable with doing. But I calmed myself down and was able to go inside with Michael and have a conversation with him while Michael went off to help with dishes. Turns out, this guy is really nice and friendly, very welcoming, calm and peaceful. I pretty much asked for an overview of the basic beliefs that he held and would be teaching in the course and explained in short where I was coming from spiritually.

So will I take this course? I had a lot to think about on the ride home last night. I am not sure I agree with the “everything is alive” Native American view that seems to be held with this course, but I\u2019m not sure. We are all “made of stars” who can say what a soul is exactly?

I finally decided that I do want to take it.

Over these past few years I\u2019ve read plenty of books and articles about religion and spirituality, done meditation, worked with rune stones, but it\u2019s all been a solitary journey. I\u2019ve become overly analytical when it comes to religion/spirituality, and I have a difficult time getting excited about it because I have so much fear of my emotions getting the better of me and clouding my judgement. Unfortunately I believe this has become a problem, I have reached a barrier spiritually because of my inability to budge from my analytical approach.

I think getting involved with a group will be an important step in my spiritual growth. This group is one I believe I can get involved with, there aren\u2019t any fundamental basics that I disagree with, and there is something about this path that has really sparked my interest. Going to sweat lodges, drumming sessions, crystal bowl healing, exploring the inner consciousness through meditation, and learning methods of self-improvement.

No Almighty God, no politics, just working to become a better person and properly react to the world around me. Yes, that\u2019s what I want.

Love you myn (%