Matt D's Blog

A check is on the way to the finance company and to me.

Thanks Chris in Texas.

After about 1.5 weeks, I (may) have sold my car. The person buying it is going to the bank now to get a cashier’s check, and then is coming for the car tomorrow morning. I’m happy and sad at the same time. I’ll take some last pictures, rinse it, take my stuff out, and take the plates off before they come.

and :-/

Update: Fell through. Going to Smith Cairns on Monday.

I’ve come to the conclusion that anying involving money is annoying, but anything related to buying or selling of cars is twice as much so. I am in the middle of leasing a new car for mom to use, and in the process of getting rid of my own. After I was in Florida, I realized that keeping my car wasn’t the best thing to do financially. So I decided that I should find a car that was relatively inexpensive and decent on fuel for mom to use for 2 years. Unfortunately, all good leasing deals are on 3 years, so that’s what we did. We leased a Honda Accord last night, and mom really liked it. More on it when I get it.

I’ve realized that in order to move forward, I need to sell the Mustang. It’s not something I want to do, but it’ll save me like $1k a month. If I do that, I can be debt free in less then 6 months, convert the LS to electric, and then eventually get a different car. We’re going to get the Toyota Yaris for my grandmother assuming we like it tonight. (Not gonna lease it until I’ve got my money from the Mustang, but we’re going to try and test drive the Toyota tonight.)

Work wasn’t fun yesterday, just so much crap to go through becuase one of my bosses is leaving, and I have to take on some of his responsibilities…Knowledge transfer and getting things in order isn’t fun. I have to continue on it today.

Today we got up at 9 AM, went to Denny’s for breakfast, and then came back home. I then updated the weblog entries, and then I’m going to pack, take a shower, get ready for the ride to the airport and our trip home. See ya’s soon!

We got home without incident, this time the plane actually took off about 3 minutes early, and we made it in to the airport slightly early. We got in about 6:59 PM, and it took us until about 7:30 PM to get our luggage. Then we went home, where Leon had gotten dinner for my grandmother and us. It was very nice of him to do so.

Overall I’m glad I went on vacation, but it’s back to work now. :-/

Today we went to the beach, yet again. We stayed for about 3.5 hours, and we went with my aunt’s friend too. The first hour wasn’t bad at all because the sun wasn’t really out, but instead of seaweed, there was a ton of fish in the water…It’s such a strange feeling to have them biting at your feet. The sun then came out, and we had lunch, went into the water again, and then dried off and went home.

We then went to a nails place so my grandmother could get a manicure and a pedicure. It then started to rain very hard, and things started flooding. It floods really quickly in FL, because they don’t have a lot of drainage at all. What usually happens is the sun comes out, and it evaporates, and that’s the end of it.

We then went out to dinner, and came home and watched {Proof}. It was pretty decent, a little slow, but decent. Then we went to sleep.

Today it’s been raining. But before it started raining, I cleaned up my aunt’s office of all the junk that’s accumulated there in the past 8 days, installed her CD-RW drive, and ran the wiring for her photo printer that she picked up. I was supposed to test drive a 2001 Porsche 911, and I will if the rain clears up, but I’m not so sure about that right now…

Well, as it turns out, we weren’t able to do that. We visited her job, and talked there with her boss and coworkers for a while, and then by the time we were leaving, the place was already closed. I was kinda surprised that it closed at 5 PM, but it was a Friday…

We came home and watched “Hoodwinked” which I thought was funny, but not as good as say “Shrek.” We then had Ham and Rice for dinner, and then we went back to my aunt Cathrine’s house. We were there for a while, had cake and coffee, and said our goodbyes to them.

We then came back home and watched “Failure to Launch” which was decent, and funny at times. Now being it’s 11:40 PM, we brought back the watched DVDs to Blockbuster, and after I update this entry, I’m going to sleep.

Today we went on a 3 hour sightseeing tour, called the Jungle Queen tour boat. It was a tour up the river showing off houses, and a trip to their island which had a bunch of animals on it, such as different birds, monkeys, peacocks, and some ducks. We had a good time, and I got some good pictures, which are in raw format on my camera, so it’ll take some time to get them into the gallery. Update: See Jungle Queen Gallery here.

We also rented a few movies from Blockbuster, and watched Syriana.

Syriana is a very long, very complex movie, that will probably take me 3 viewings to really “get”, so I’m going to reserve judgement until then. The movie moved along well, but there were just way too many things in there for one viewing.

Not too much going on today, went and visited my aunt Cathrine and uncle Buddy. Didn’t do too much else. We saw Superman Returns, I thought it was pretty good. It definitely had some unbelieveable points in it though, but overall it was good. (ie, lifting of the formation into space wihtout issues, etc)

Happy Fourth of July! The 4th wasn’t very exciting overall, but a good time nevertheless. We went to the Sawgrass Mills mall, and parked in front of “Wannado City” which is this cool place for kids to be able to “do what they want to do” (get it?)…Ie, news reporter, police officer, airplane pilot or attendant, etc..For only $20! (Of course it had some financial gain for them…) Pretty neat concept though. Anyway, we walked through the mall with myself, my grandmother, my aunt, and one of her friends, who stayed with us the whole day. I picked up 2 pairs of sneakers for $89…as seen here:



and

… other image coming soon, but a pair of NewBalance 620s

After that, we had lunch, and then some ice cream from Hagen-Dazs, which was really good. We then stopped by my aunt’s friend’s house, and talked there for a while. Then we went back home and started making dinner, and once my aunt got back from grabbing some pasta and bread, and her friend got here, we had dinner.

Then we went to go see fireworks. Well, the fireworks were supposed to start at 9 PM. We got to the beach around 8:30, and found some parking in a nearby Walgreens parking lot. We walked to the beach, and set up a spot. And then we waited. And waited. And waited. At 8:58 they started playing some patriotic music, and then…nothing. 9:15 comes and goes. Then 9:30. Finally at 9:45 the barge pulls into position, and the fireworks begin. Before all this, you have idiots shooting off fireworks on the beach, in this huge crowd of people. If that’s not a good reason why fireworks are outlawed in NY, I’m not sure what is. People are plain stupid. This is an undeniable fact. Thankfully, nobody got hurt, at least not that I saw.

The fireworks display was nice, and I’ll have the pics from my digital camera in the gallery soon. My aunt took video of it on her camera too. When it came time to leave, however, it was pretty crazy. The display ended about 10:15 PM. We got off the beach, and headed into Walgreens, because the street was crazy. We left Walgreens at 10:40 PM, and then tried to go to the left (the way we needed to go)…and was told by police to go to the right. So we drove, and drove….to the next major street so we could head back in the correct direction. We finally got through the large amount of traffic, and made it home at 11:30 PM. I called Leon and talked to him for some time, and then went to sleep.

Today we went to the beach again, nothing too exciting, except I layed down under a palm tree after being in the water for a while. Then I started downloading some old pics off my camera after we came back and showered. I’m looking for some things to do in FL for the rest of the vacataion, and in particular something for the 4th. Tonight we picked up a photo printer for my aunt Judy, and then walked on the strip in Fort Lauterdale.

We went to dinner at Max’s Place, which, while Rachel Ray might approve, was not that great in my opinion. Appetizer wasn’t very flavorful, didn’t bring the drinks the way we asked, prices weren’t so great, and the main course was so/so. Overall, pretty blah. Then we went to Dairy Queen for some ice cream, and went home to relax. I noticed when looking in the mirror that I got a little bit of color in my face, and unfortunately some sunburn on my shoulders. Nothing serious enough to have me in major pain though, so it’s ok.

I finally added in the NY Auto Show 2006 files. They’re not edited, just resized. I also finally fixed the header, so that other pages are working again….

Before I came down to Florida, I found an interesting ad on the Austin EV Trading Post page talking about exotic car (Porsches, Lamborghinis, Rolls Royces) conversions, and that this person also had a Porsche 959 EV conversion for sale. I contacted this person, and asked about a test drive. He said that I’d be able to get a ride in it without a problem. Good enough for me. It happened to have one of the exact configurations that I was going to possibly use for the Lincoln LS EV conversion. It used a DC motor, which is cheaper then an AC motor setup. I’d heard an AC setup was “so much better” from some sources, and from others that it wasn’t that big of a deal.

Well, Sunday was the day I was able to find out for myself. We drove up to West Palm Beach, which was about 35 minutes away from Judy’s house. It ended up we went to this guy’s house. The house was pretty laughable. There was a Rolls Royce, and two Porsches in the front yard, but barely a driveway, and the house looked very run down. As it turned out, it was a design studio for their replica bodies for the conversions. In the garage was the 959, another 9xx series car, two Carerra GT style cars, and two Lamborghini Diablo style cars. We talked for a while, and then we went on a short trip. I was impressed by the performance of the car, as he started the car off in either 3rd or 4th gear, and it was still very acceptable acceleration. It was a little noisier then I expected, but overall, I think with the amount of insulation between the engine compartment and the passenger compartment, it’ll be fine.

So, off to saving 10k by using DC motors.

On Saturday we got up at 9:30, went to the beach. Thankfully Judy lives only about 10 minutes away, so it’s not a long trek either way. It was a very nice day, very sunny. We put down our towels, put on sun block, and then went into the water. The temperature of the water was great, but there was a lot of seaweed in the water. It was strange, because it wasn’t green, it was brown seaweed. The sand got really hot in the sun (duh), and by the time we got ouf of the water around 11:30 or so, I burned the bottom of my feet walking back to the towels. We laid on the towels for a short while, then went back in the water again. After about another 30 mins, we decided to eat our lunch and then leave. We left around 1 PM. We went home and showered. Then we went to Publix and bought food for the next two nights. We were making Stuffed Peppers and Tuna Caserole. We went back home and relaxed for a little while, and by the time we started making food, we decided that the Tuna Caserole would be for tonight because it takes a lot less time to make. Mom then noticed a white stripe on her leg from where Judy applied sunblock, and that the rest of her leg was very red because she missed the rest of it. I only had some minor sun on my ears, and my scalp got more sun then I’d like :-/