Sunday, September 09, 2007

Flattery will you get you everywhere

Gosh, thank you all so much for your comments! I'm blushing here. Thank you for all your kind words and congratulations. (And that picture of me is one of the rare good ones. I'm wearing my one and only busty, clingy, Show Me Some Leg, Baby(tm) dress (which you can't really tell from the picture. High enough leg that I can't bend over more than 30 degrees from vertical, you know?)).

I'll post more pics tomorrow for the Week! Of! Finished! Things!

Thanks again, and I'm sorry I haven't visited your blogs much lately. I'm missing you all but I just kind of curled up into myself the last week and a half. But I'll catch up soon.

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Bah, selling a car is a real pain in the derriere.

It's my beloved old Civic, Betty. I don't usually name cars, but she came with a name so I kept it: Betty Bivic the Civic. She's a great car. Runs fabulously, has never broken down, rarely needed anything fixed except routine maintenance (the muffler rusted out last year and had to be replaced, but for as long as Betty's been around, that's not all that unusual.

She's kind of scraped up on the side (parking garages with too small spaces) and nicked up a little from 10+ years of being on the road. Yeah, yeah, no air conditioning. No power locks. Busted radio. But homey and reliable and clean and safe. And no accidents and a clean title and lower mileage than you'd expect.

We've spent a lot of time this weekend vacuuming, cleaning the upholstery, washing, clay-ing, waxing. Sad that the cleanest she's ever been is when I'm trying to sell her.

We've gotten a lot of calls. A couple of drop-bys. I hate this. Are we asking too much? Too little? K didn't make some number up out of his head, he looked at a number of comparable listings, looked at the blue book value, the expected trade-in. But yet I keep mulling it all over in my head over and over and over again.

I admit I'm an awful, awful negotiator. I don't haggle. If it's not the price I want to pay, I walk away. I wonder if I have a big sticker that says "SUCKER" on my back that everyone can see but me, 'cause it hasn't been going all that well. I feel like an anachronism, having a car for 8 years, having bought it used in the first place.

The scrape on the passenger back side seems to be a sticking point. I never cared all that much about it, but I also came from driving a '79 Toyota whose hood had rusted shut and the driver's side door wouldn't open from the outside any more (that was a great car too, until the hood and door problems started. Oh yeah, the break lines were starting to go too. But it was GREAT until then).

(Aside: this is probably why I should never get a new car, if I never bothered to fix the scratches on the side. K says: if I had a new car, I'd take better care of it. I respond: no, then I'd be always paranoid about it getting dirty, scratched, stolen, broken, etc.)

Anyway. I keep reminding myself, this is no life 'n' death thing. If it's priced too high (we're negotiable, yes. But only up to a point on this, the first day of the listing), then we'll drop the price, no? And it's time to sell her. Heck, I don't even drive to work. 3 cars is 2 too many.

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In lovely, wonderful, much happier news, I got a present in the mail! On Saturday! La of JenLa sent me some yarn! And some super-cute sheep cards (awwwww).

I sent her some PFD fingering weight a while ago because it was just sitting there in the stash gathering dust and she was deep into Knit-From-Your-Stash territory. (The yarn was from an impropriety involving ebay and a dyer's clearance sale).

It's a bouncy merino in the luscious JenLa colorway, which reminds me of all the blackberries and raspberries I've been stuffing myself with this weekend. YUM. Thank you La!
Hand-dyed sock yarn hangin' with the dahlias

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