April 20, 2009: New Car

I slept in a bit too much this morning.  I was really exhausted from staying up so late last night.  I woke up to the phone ringing.  It was our salesperson from Orange County BMW calling to schedule our pickup of the new car.  We decided to try to do it over lunch so that it would have minimal impact on our day.  This did not turn out to be the case but that was the plan.  So we arranged to pick it up at one this afternoon.

The weather really turned on us.  It is much colder today.  We had temperatures around eighty two days ago and sixty yesterday and today we are around forty degrees!  Ugh.

I got to work and ended up having a crazy morning.  I worked as quickly as I could trying to get everything that I could possibly get done completed before we needed to leave to deal with the car.  It was all that I could do just to keep up.  What a busy morning.

Our insurance company called to walk me through the insurance changes today because of the new car.  Because of the changes to our insurance (changing our commuting parameters, switching from a sport convertible to the SUV, etc.) our insurance is dropping a bit.  I love my insurance company (BMW/Liberty Mutual.)  They really treat us great.  Our prices are amazing and the service is wonderful.  They are very friendly and easy to deal with for everything.  We are saving around $30/month because of the changes.  Every little bit helps.

I didn’t get a chance to even attempt a shower until a quarter after noon – just barely before we were supposed to be running out of the door.  What a busy day.

We got on the road just in time.  It was raining by the time that we left and very cold.  By the time that we got to Harriman, New York we were getting hail!  Talk about a change in the weather.

The process at OC BMW took a bit longer than we had expected but they were able to switch our plates and take care of some stuff for us that they had originally thought that they would not be able to do so it ended up working out well.

Our financing did not go as well as we had planned.  We ended up owing more money on the 330 than we had thought that we owed which made things difficult.  So we had to do some fancy financing tricks to make the X3 a reality today.  It worked out okay, though.  We had to put more money down than we had planned but nothing crazy and we had to do some maneuvering with the dealership between the price and finance rate (we ended up taking a cut on the price while paying more in interest) but in the end I think that it worked out well and may actually be advantageous to us in the long run if we manage the finances on the car well for the next two years.  At the end of the day I was pretty happy with how the financial turned out.  Since we are doing our car financing through BMW Financial we also qualified for BMW Visa cards which will give us credits towards our next BMW purchase so we are totally going to take advantage of that!

Speaking of financials, while we were waiting at the car dealer I saw the news that Oracle had agreed to purchased Sun Microsystems.  Overall I am not completely sure how to take the news but I think, most likely, that it is pretty good news.  Far better than IBM buying Sun.  Oracle and Sun seem to be more in tune with one another and it doesn’t eliminate one of the big server players.  Having only three seemed like a bad idea.  I can live with four.  But Sun plays an important role in market diversification.  The only concerns now are the long term plans that Oracle may have for some of Sun’s software intellectual property like MySQL, Java and Solaris.  It will be important to watch that space to see what Oracle decides to do in the years to come.

After completing everything with the car we were really starving so we drove down to Cosimo’s and got lunch.  Their gorgonzola cheese melted over waffle fries is one of the best things ever.  We just love it.

The drive home was our first long drive with the new X3.  It did pretty well.  I can see that it will be pretty comfortable for long family trips.  We are kicking around the idea of going to Annapolis and/or Bar Harbor pretty soon and we would need the X3 for a trip of a length like that.

Highlights of the new X3 include much lower car payments (almost $200 less per month!), heated seats front and back, tons of storage space, built-in navigation system, Bluetooth integration so that we can just talk to the car and it communicates through our mobile phones, front to rear moonroof so the entire sky is visible, etc.  So far we are pretty happy with the purchase.  Something had to be done and this really seemed to be the economical, utilitarian solution that met our needs and saved us money while remaining safe and convenient.  Dominica has wanted an X3 for a while so she is definitely thrilled.

Once we got back home it was back to work for me.  Way too much work that needs catching up.  Today turned out to be a pretty rough day to be physically out of the office for most of the day.  But dealing with the car was not something that should wait and now it is all set.  All we have to do yet is to have the insurance photos taken and that can be down right downtown so it is no big deal at all.  Will probably have Dominica run out and do that tomorrow.

I worked for the office until quite late and then it was time to get down to some writing that I have been getting behind on and desperately need to get caught up.  Liesl fell asleep really early, around six thirty, and because we had such a big and unhealthy lunch I skipped dinner completely.  So my entire evening was dedicated to getting work done as much as possible.

I got my first article for the day completed around a quarter after ten this evening.  You can check out my article on Microblogging for Business on SMBITJournal.

It really rained today.  Hours of pouring rain.  We got some pretty good thunder in there as well.  I had been hoping to be able to take a nice, long walk tonight since I didn’t get to take one earlier today but the rain really put a damper on that idea.  The rain was far too heavy to allow for walking outside.

I ended up working late.  Very late.  It was four thirty by the time that I finally managed to get off to bed.  It was good that I stayed up, though, because I was able to get a lot of work done and I feel that it was very valuable.  Tomorrow is going to be a rough day.