Commentary From the Mile High City

 
"Star of the conservative blogosphere" Denver Post

"The Rocky Mountain Alliance offers the best of what the blogosphere has to offer." -David Harsanyi, Denver Post
 
 contact
Joshua Sharf
PDA
 search

 notify list
to receive email when this site is updated, enter your email address:
 archives
 recent posts
 categories
24 (2 entries)
Anglosphere (1 entries)
Biking (1 entries)
Blogging (35 entries)
Business (173 entries)
CFA (3 entries)
China (5 entries)
Climate Change (3 entries)
Colorado (20 entries)
Denver (12 entries)
Design (4 entries)
Economics (39 entries)
Education (6 entries)
Electoral College (1 entries)
Environmentalism (3 entries)
Europe (0 entries)
Flying (2 entries)
Foreign Affairs (1 entries)
General (89 entries)
Gun Control (2 entries)
Health Care (7 entries)
Higher Ed (7 entries)
History (8 entries)
Home Improvement (1 entries)
Illegal Immigration (35 entries)
Internet (4 entries)
Israel (57 entries)
Jewish (49 entries)
Judicial Nominations (12 entries)
Katrina (0 entries)
Literature (1 entries)
Media (37 entries)
Music (3 entries)
Photoblogging (32 entries)
Politics (152 entries)
Porkbusters (5 entries)
Radio (16 entries)
Religion (1 entries)
Reviews (8 entries)
Robed Masters (4 entries)
Science (1 entries)
Sports (9 entries)
Taxes (2 entries)
Transportation (6 entries)
Unions (1 entries)
War on Terror (180 entries)
 links
 blogs
my other blogs
Three-Letter Monte
Blogcritics.org
PoliticsWest.Com
Newsbusters.org

Rocky Mtn. Alliance
Best Destiny
Daily Blogster
Drunkablog
Exvigilare
Geezerville USA
Mount Virtus
Night Twister
Rocky Mountain Right
Slapstick Politics
The New Conservative
Thinking Right
View from a Height

other blogs
Powerline
One Big Swede
American Thinker
Meryl Yourish
Instapundit
NRO Corner
Little Green Footballs
No Left Turns
A Constrained Vision

business blogs
800CEORead
Accidental Verbosity
Assymetrical Information
BusinessPundit
Carnival of the Capitalists
Catallarchy
Cold Springs Shops
Commodity Trader
Coyote Blog
Different River
EconLog
Everyone's Illusion
Fast Company Blog
Financial Rounds
Footnoted
Freakonomics Blog
ShopFloor.org
Lip-Sticking
Management Craft
Trader Mike
Carnival of the Capitalists Submission

business data
Inst. Supply Mgmt.
St. Louis Fed Economic Data
Nat'l Bureau of Economic Research
Economic Calendar
Stock Charts

colorado blogs
Pirate Ballerina
Pagan Capitalist
Boker Tov, Boulder
Colorado Pols
Jeff Sherman

<-?Colorado BlogRing#->

sites, not blogs
Thinking Rock Press
 help israel
Israel Travel Ministry
Friends of the IDF
Volunteers for Israel
Magen David Adom
CAMERA
 1939 World's Fair
1939: The Lost World of the Fair
The New York World's Fair: 1939-1940
The Last Great Fair by Jeffrey Hart
Iconography of Hope (U.Va.)
Images From the '39 Fair
Tour the 1939 New York Fair
Paleo-Future
Powered by
Movable Type 3.2

« Carnival of the Capitalists | Main | Disappointed »

Gasket Case

So, when I was up in the mountains for Thanksgiving, I got the car onto some snow. While I was looking for a good place to turn around and get off the snow, it got stuck. In the process of rocking it back and forth, all in low gear, of course, I overheated the engine, blowing off about half the antifreeze.

Now I had thought about just leaving the car there to tow, but it was Friday afternoon, snow was predicted for the weekend, and I was fairly sure that if I didn't get the thing out of there now, I wouldn't see it again until the retreating glacier disgorged it in May.

So, it was 30 miles in high gear and coasting back to Basalt, which apparently managed to fry the head gasket.

The old car was good to me, although it had almost 130K on it, and things were starting to break. But it's been a long, slow, frustrating funeral, and both it and I deserve better.

The last time I bought a new car, it was fairly simple. I had had three Ford Escorts in a row, and wanted to move up, to the Contour. (The Sebring convertible was out of my price range, and I wanted something new, not used.) I decided I wanted last year's model, but new, with a power option package, and a stick. I called a Ford dealership in the area, they located the one such car left between the Mississippi and the Continental Divide, and - lucky me! - it was on south Broadway. I looked up the invoice price of the car and options in Edmunds, added a couple of hundred dollars, and that was that.

This time, I had two possible models in mind, the Jeep Wrangler and the Subaru Outback. Very different cars, but both with good off-road capability and each with certain advantages. Thus far, I've test-driven 7 cars at 5 different dealerships, with one more left to go. Since used cars are on the menu this time, I've spent more time on the Net doing research than I thought humanly possible.

While some of the dealerships seem staffed by normal people, others display that schizophrenia which the manager and the salesman blame on each other. I have been invited down to take a long test-drive, only to be told that they wanted to run credit first. I have been quoted a number, only to be told that it was just an example. I've had a Nissan dealer tell me that he had no way of finding out the sale date of the Jeep he wanted to sell me. (Hey, bud, ever heard of CarFax?) A couple of dealerships have treated me well, showing me their invoices, and another let me take a Wrangler home overnight. But I gotta tell you, it's a real mixed bag.

I'm finally down to three cars, and if I don't hear back from the owner of that last one, I'm down to two.

I cannot tell you how happy I will be when this is over.

Post a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)




  booklist

Power, Faith, and Fantasy


Six Days of War


An Army of Davids


Learning to Read Midrash


Size Matters


Deals From Hell


A War Like No Other


Winning


A Civil War


Supreme Command


The (Mis)Behavior of Markets


The Wisdom of Crowds


Inventing Money


When Genius Failed


Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking


Back in Action : An American Soldier's Story of Courage, Faith and Fortitude


How Would You Move Mt. Fuji?


Good to Great


Built to Last


Financial Fine Print


The Day the Universe Changed


Blog


The Multiple Identities of the Middle-East


The Case for Democracy


A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam


The Italians


Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory


Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures


Reading Levinas/Reading Talmud