After looking closely at the Toyota Prius and Honda Civics in Part 1 I started looking very closely at the Mazda 3. The 3 comes in too many varieties to keep track of, but got good reviews in Consumer Reports with very good expected reliability. The mileage was just a mile per gallon or two less than the Civic, but it has more horsepower and therefore better acceleration. By choosing a manual transmission, the mileage should still be very good, around 27 mpg to the Civic’s 28. While the Civics were running around invoice price, the 3 is selling below invoice due to some dealer incentives. The guy at the dealer said via e-mail that his offer was for me to build any type of Mazda3 I wanted and he would take $2,000 off the MSRP, putting it below invoice. For about the same price as the Civic LX without a sunroof, I could get the 3 with a sunroof and a stereo that holds 6 CD’s (including MP3-encoded CD’s). Like with Honda, I could get 1.9% financing for up to 36 months. So I can finance $11,000 and pay about $320 a month. Then I only have to come up with $7,000 in cash.
Category: Uncategorized
Car Shopping Part 1
Today I started car shopping seriously. One of the top cars on my list is the Toyota Prius. However, with gas prices having gone up so much lately, demand is much higher than it was a few months ago and dealers want full MSRP sticker price. In the Southeast all Toyota dealers will also charge a “doc fee” which is $599. I will also have to pay 7% in sales tax. The good news is that tag and title are only $21. As long as I order the car in advance I can get whatever color I want and avoid dealer add-ons like Toyoguard which add hundreds of dollars more (Toyoguard alone is $699 almost all of which is profit). But there is a 4-8 week wait. One dealer admitted they are asking $1995 over MSRP, but the norm seems to be right at MSRP. The Prius with Pkg 2 options then is $23,799 plus $599 doc fee, $1707.86 in taxes for a total of $26,126.
Bridge Builders
This week is Public Employee Recognition Week. To celebrate, our management gave us ice cream and cake on Tuesday. Another event was to have a bridge building contest. They had a wooden bridge about 4 feet wide and 20 feet long that you could assemble like blocks and the contest was to see which team of 4 could disassemble and reassemble the bridge in the shortest amount of time. When they sent the sign-up sheet around I was surprised nobody in our office was participating, but I wanted to do it and three other people in my group were willing to do it too. Yesterday we watched as they unloaded the pieces and started thinking about the fastest way to assemble the bridge (which some people thought was cheating), but the bridge was in a courtyard, so a lot of people could see it from the windows.
This morning we watched a few of the early teams try it out and got a couple of good ideas. We thought of some more stuff and drew up diagrams of where people should stand and what parts they would be responsible for. Given that we design bridges, the expectations were much higher for us than, say, our contract administration office. We showed up in hard hats and vests and our plan in mind. When the whistle blew we worked very fast and it was over in what seemed like no time. I was actually breathing hard from the exertion even though it had only taken about a minute. Our co-workers watching from the offices above held up signs with “10” on them like in the Olympics. After lunch they tabulated all of the scores and we were the only team out of about 10 that had broken the one minute barrier: 57 seconds. Each of the team members got a $25 gift card, t-shirt with our logo, mouse pad, and a couple of other trinkets.
Plump Juicy Raisins
The front of the box of Raisin Bran I have in my cupboard says “Hundreds of plump juicy Sun-Maid raisins.” But they aren’t plump and juicy. They are dried and shriveled like all raisins. If they were plump and juicy wouldn’t they be grapes? It just bugs me they would go out of their way to put something so blatantly false on the box.
It’s not much different from when they used to say that some cereal was part of a nutritious breakfast. The rest of the nutritious breakfast was the milk you’d put on the cereal, orange juice, eggs, toast, and fruit. Take the cereal out of that equation and you’d still have a nutritious breakfast, but with fewer calories. What they should have said was that the cereal was a completely unnecessary part of a nutritious breakfast.
Digging a Hole to China
I was reading some comments from Thursday’s episode of Lost. There is a reference to Tunisia and someone pointed out that the opposite side of the earth from Tunisia is the South Pacific off the coast of New Zealand (about where the Lost island is thought to be located). They linked to this website:
http://www.zefrank.com/sandwich/tool.html
So I spent a while playing around with that and learned that most places have ocean on the other side of the earth including all of the continental US, Europe, Africa, and Australia. What a boring planet. South America has an opposite in China (must be where the idea of digging a hole to China originated) and Indonesia.