Dec 8/9 - Painting / Painting

That just about sums it up -- painting on the 8th and more painting on the 9th. The first day was primer -- two walls in the living room, two walls in the dining room, one wall in the upstairs bedroom. The second day was final coat, 4 dining room walls, two living room walls and upstairs bedroom wall ... well, not quite. The upstairs bedroom wall has had an initial coat of a flat paint that Riley had leftover and tomorrow we're putting the final coat on. Sandy did the boundary cutting upstairs and I've done the cutting downstairs and all the rolling.

So what else ... not much that I can remember -- oh yes, we did go to the BMW and Mercedes dealerships to look at cars. We were supposed to do a test drive at the BMW dealer but that got messed up due to a miscommunication between me and the sales person. We were going back and forth discussing pricing etc. on the new X5's and I'd been referring to it as the X5 335d. Well, it's actually the X5 35d. So when we went to the dealer and she walked us out to a 335d (3-series) we naturally weren't interested in test driving that and they didn't have an X5 35d available for test drive.

Now, I can blame myself for this one, I guess. The entire content of our email discussion was around X5's, pricing, options etc. so when we go back and forth talking about a test drive of such, she obviously took the 335d out of the context of our entire email discussion as she planned for the test drive. Well ... I guess.

Anyway, we did get to look at the new X5, use our tape measure and compare luggage space etc. which is slightly different with the new version. The rear seats won't go vertical, which would be uncomfortable for someone sitting back there but Abby doesn't care. We usually travel with those seats vertical because that provides enough space for much more luggage as well as my bike ... hmmm.

I think that we should get a Suburban or Tahoe.

Next we went to the Mercedes dealer; the new ML350 is priced better than the X5 and similar in many other respects. The guy did say that it has a softer ride. We didn't plan for a test drive; told the guy that if we want to do that, we'll do so once we're back in January. He was trying to convince us to "go ahead and place an order now" that it "wouldn't matter" if we didn't take the car when it was delivered ... no money down required ... hmmm ... I'm not so sure that I even want this car and won't want/need it unless the X5 dies ... so I'm not placing any orders, thank you.

I'm also not focused on getting a new car and paying the drive-off-the-lot premium. In fact, BMW has a number of X5's CPO (Certified Pre-Owned) available on their website with 10-20,000 miles and better pricing than the 2012 X5.

The Mercedes guy obviously wanted to make his December numbers and hey, if in February upon delivery we didn't want the car, that was another year !

Right.

--------

On another subject entirely, I bought a couple of CD's by Eric Woolfson, who was the other key player in the Alan Parsons Project. The first, Freudiana, sounds like Parsons and indeed, he did a lot of the engineering. Freudiana was never released in North America, so it was a 20-something dollar CD mailed from the U.K. The second, "Sings the Alan Parsons that Never Was" is a collection songs by Woolfson that never made it onto the AP albums. Easy listening but not particularly complex, lacking the benefit of Parsons' engineering, was my first impression. Sprinkled among the AP albums they'd have been ok. All together, I'm not sure. I'll listen to both albums some more during our travels.

Our original plan was to leave on Monday. With the painting etc. I'm not sure if we'll make Monday. We want to leave the place ship-shape.

... and that's all for now ...

Onward !