I have spent the great majority of the morning going between reading news sites and fooling with paperwork. Since the wife and I are going to the Bahamas next month and I don’t have a passport, while her’s expire ten years ago, there is quite a bit of stuff to do.
It takes two or three weeks to get one if you are willing to pay out the nose, which we are having to do. The first thing we had to do is get online and order our birth certificates. We got hers this weekend but I didn’t get mine until today because a signature is required and of course I am at work during the day. Fortunately I am off today and tomorrow. My first two days off in a row since December 8th. I feel it too.
I was supposed to go to the doctor today at 9:30 or so but they have moved the office and I misunderstood where the location was. Needless to say I missed my appointment. They were nice enough to reschedule it for tomorrow morning for me. That’s cool because I have some writing to do today anyway. Tomorrow I am keeping RePete home with me as she also has a doctor’s appointment tomorrow afternoon.
I have to go pick up another copy of my auto insurance policy as well. We have decided that the time has come to get new automobiles and as much as I am a fan of driving a car until the wheels fall off and hate car payments, it’s not worth the inconvenience when one of them breaks down and that will be at some point in the near future. We both take good care of our cars and have over 200k on both of them, but with my job I can’t be car-less. Since I donated the van a few months ago to the Alzheimer’s Association I don’t have an extra vehicle in case something happens with one of these.
I prefer to go through 99% of the car buying process online. Financing all the way up to finding the car. All I should have to do at the dealer is take a test drive and if I like it, drive it the hell out of there. The last car I bought was in 2000 and we ended up spending about 30 minutes in the dealership. The only reason it took that long is that I had not arranged to have it added to my insurance ahead of time. I won’t make that mistake this time. I have to stop and fax my license, insurance and references to the financing company in the morning and then I can start looking at cars. I was hoping to have everything taken care of by yesterday morning so that I could pick the car up today but no such luck. That’s OK, it will give me time for a bit of research. The wife can go get her car this weekend and I will go on my days off next week after researching a few. I still haven’t decided what I want anyway.
Traffic has been pretty heavy (for me) at the site over the last 72 hours, mainly because of the Meredith Emerson posts I put up. Somehow I have landed fairly high at Google and Yahoo! (number 2 and 4, respectively) and I have had something like 16,000 visits on those two posts alone. Several comments as well, which is nice because it means that someone is actually reading it and not just breezing through. If I could just bottle that and figure out how Google picks the top stories I would retire my happy ass tomorrow.