Cars Suck

So remember my midlife crisis convertible? Yeah, it's already history and I haven't even gotten it yet. I put my deposit down in March but it was unavailable until last week. I picked it all out last week, colors, features, the whole deal. At the time I told them the financial parameters and asked them to get back to me on delivery. Today I got an e-mail. I can get delivery in mid-November. Two problems with this, I have to turn in my current leased mommy van before that, and I live in Minnesota. We could have twenty inches of snow on the ground by then. Did I mention the convertible part? Here was the biggy. The monthly lease payment would be $578. Are they freaking kidding me?! That's more than I paid for rent in my first place! It's a VW not a BMW!!! No way. I could get my payments down to a reasonable level is to put $12,300 down. WHAT?! Basically they want me to pay the entire sticker price over the course of the lease. Not happening. Everybody probably already knows how this lease thing works, but the lease payments are calculated based on how long you use the car and what the dealer can sell it for at the end of the lease (known as the residual value). So in simple math take the sticker minus this residual and you get the price of the lease. Basically my dealer thinks that they can get zero for this car when it's returned which I know is BS and they know is BS but the car has become high demand so they don't want to commit to the original sticker price.

I told them where they could send me a refund of my deposit (I was very nice, I didn't tell them where they could stick the lease calculations) and no thank you, I will not be buying a VW. In a bit of a panic because I've been at this for 5 months, thought this was a done deal, have no back up plan and a van to return, I turned to my pal the internet. I found the local Infiniti dealership practically giving away G35 Coupes. They are a perfect screaming engine sports coupe for my midlife crisis. I can stick to what I wanted to put down and the payments are substantially less than I'm paying on the van. Whew!

So, as this is a knitting blog, I have actually been doing some knitting. I'm knitting the mistake rib scarf from "Last Minute Knitted Gifts". I'm knitting it for my One Skein SP, which is cheating because this requires two skeins of yarn but my One Skein plans have run into a glitch. I can't find my copy of One Skein. Anywhere. I've searched high and low. I've re-organized all my books and knitting stuff. Nothing. Can't find it. So I'm now a big fat cheater boots. I love this pattern though. The two skeins of Noro are interchanged every two rows and it turns into a cool stripey pattern. You never know what the next stripe sequence is going to look like and for the incurably curious, it is very hard to put down. Try it, you will like it!


In other blog news, I've had to implement the dreaded word verification on the comments. I'm being semi-spammed by weirdos trying to use the comment section to sell stuff. This is not about you Roger Clinton, we love you and need you to keep reading and commenting. (I'm not saying you aren't a tool short of a full shed sometimes, but we still love ya) But we'll have to start the word verification thing on my blog. I know most of you are using it on your blogs already and I'm a late starter on this. However, as I usually read blogs very early in the morning, I know that sometimes it takes me a couple tries to spell VHKJA or some such crap and I didn't want to inconvenience you all.

I've gotta get back to my scarf. I'll talk to you all tomorrow.