100 posts and a new Hemi

So this is my 100th post!!!! And just to think that I never thought I had a future in blogging. I never cease to amaze myself. Originally I had planned to have a Happy Spring 100th post and give you some awesome pictures of Woodland in the Spring time but then I had some vehicular drama in the meantime. I'll get to that but I'm going to start with my spring pictures.

Almond trees are HUGE around here. My hometown is home of the Almond Festival

The Trees in the parking lot at work. So pretty but cause so many headaches....

Some random honeysuckles growng wild in my unkept yard
My iris peeking out

Looking out my front door.....

Ok, now on to my vehicular drama. It all begin in the fall when I started noticing a funky smell in our Kia. I kept telling Andrew that it smelt like ass in there and we needed to clean it out really well. I even shampooed the seats thinking that the smell was from having the dogs in there. I cleaned and cleaned and cleaned to no avail. It still reeked. Fast foward to the end of February. Andrew and I make the hour drive in pouring rain to have dinner with his folks for his birthday. Dinner is delicious, I have creme brulee (my favorite!!!!) and we drive home in the pouring rain. The next day I go to the grocery store and while I'm packing groceries into my back seat I notice that there's STANDING WATER on the floor boards in the back seat. I immediatly look around to see if there's a water bottle that might have spilt or something but common sense is telling me that a water bottle couldn't possibly have made that much of a puddle. It was the whole back floor board and most of the way under the front seats but there's a raised spot that held the water and stopped it from going into the front where we would have noticed it. I smelt it just to make sure it was water and as far as I could tell it was. Like I said, the whole car smelt like ass so it was hard to say. I got home and alerted Andrew who checked out the situation. He was equally as baffled and while rummaging under the seat he found an old receipt that was 90% black with MOLD. Suddenly the smell of ass makes sense. We then came to the conclusion that there was a leak on the floorboard and that when we drove though the rain our back seat filled up. Since there's only two of us we never really noticed the back seat floor board. So we dry it out the best we can and sure enough the carpet reeks like ass. Now at this point this has been going on for about 5 months and God only know how much mold/mildew has been growing under the carpet between the floor board and the actual carpet. Andrew shows the mold to the mold abaitment guy at work and he says that it's bad mold and it could make us sick and/or kill us. Nice! We don't fret though because we have a Kia and the only good thing about a Kia is the 100,000 mile warranty. So we take it to the Kia dealership and explain the problem. They say no problem, we'll call you in a couple weeks. A couple weeks go by, we get the call, we go to pick the car up. Kia tells us that they could not get the authorization to take out the carpet but they did discover that the door seals were leaking and they changed those. The car now smells like orange flavored ass. So here's the dilema: nobody has pulled the carpet up to dry it out or bleach it out or anything else. The water had been leaking for quite some time and since it was standing when I noticed it it's safe to say it soaked down to the floor board. Mold/mildew thrives in dark, damp environments which the spot between the carpet and the floor is. It still reeks which tells us that there's probably quite a bit of it growing down there since you can smell it through the carpet and it's not exactly a subtle odor. So we talked. And talked. And talked some more. I wanted to keep the Kia and get someone else to change the carpet. Andrew wanted a brand new car. We talked some more. We visited dealerships. The sales people got sick of us because we only looked and never bought. We talked some more. I don't want to eat shit on the Kia which we would do if we traded it in. We talked some more about what kind of vehicle we'd like for our future. We talked about our finances. We talked about how we're paying $700 in car payments right now for two cars (one of which always sits). We talked about how nobody would buy my mistsubishi. Finally we came to this conclusion: Give the dealer both our cars which gets us out of the mitsi with no hassle and no money lost (I owe almost exactly trade in value) and take home a pickup or SUV with at least 4 doors and a tow package. We ended up with this:

It's a HEMI!!! I'd like to say I'm thrilled but I have mixed feelings. On one hand it's an awesome truck. It's used but it has low mileage (it was a lease trade in) and it's fully loaded. It has leather seats that heat up, different air controls for the passenger side and the driver side which I love, a 6 disc cd player, an infinity stereo system with controls on the wheel, cruise control, power everything, a digital thingy that tells you the temp, how many miles you have left on your case tank, what your gas mileage is, what direction you're going, etc. Even the pedals have a control to move them closer or farther away. Dodge's are known for transmission problems so we got a 5 year warranty. It's got a tow package too so we can tow any boats or trailers or anything we might accumulate in the future. And it's fun to drive. My biggest problem is that while it's fun to drive, it's not so much fun for me to park and this is now my everyday vehicle. I'm sure I'll get used to it but for the time being I'll be parking in the south forty and hiking it to the store. I'm content because it will fit the kids that are hopefully in our future and the dogs and all our junk. Andrew's happy 'cause he's a country boy and all country boys need a truck. So we'll see how I feel about it in the future. I'm hoping I come to love it. I already love the amenities :)