Today we spent four hours raking the voluminous amount of leaves out of our yard and on to the street for the city to come by and pick up. We have a few very large trees in our back yard that blanket the ground with six inches of dried up color. It’s all pretty and fun to march around in, but getting the leaves to the street is a cause of much strain and many sore muscles the following day.

In past years, it’s taken even longer as we’ve had to rake the leaves through a small gate to get them to the street. This year, I took the initiative to take part of the fence down. This gave us enough room to rake the leaves onto a large tarp and then drag them to the roadside. This idea works like a charm and I highly recommend it if you have a long way to move leaves. The tarp, like a hero’s cape, glides the leaves away from the yard with little effort on our part.

Still, it took four hours to get it done today. Last year, Laura had to do them by herself because I was in Hong Kong, and I’ve had to do it several years by myself as well. It’s known around our house as Leaf day and it’s never fun. However, after the yard is all cleaned up, it feels really great to survey the clean yard. It’s also fun to be able to work together on such nice autumn days. They’re all cleaned up this year, so we’ll wait until next year for the fun times of Leaf day.

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Click on the photo to see some photos we took while at the Circleville Pumpkin Show. We’ve been going since we’ve been married and with parades, 1600 pound pumpkins, pies, rides, and fair food, it’s always a fun time.

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Laura and I went driving the other day to take in the beautiful fall leaves that are just starting to turn.  I brought the camera along and will be adding photos to our ‘Fall Drive’ photo album on our website.  Click on the photo above to see all the photos we took as we add more photos as the leaves continue to change.

We got two new things at our house this week. The first was all the grass seedlings that we planted sprung up while we were in Texas! We worked so hard to get the yard prepped for the seeds, and then broke our backs raking, spreading, and dropping dirt, seed, and straw. We’ve had several bad bald spots in our yard, and now all of the areas are looking good with new grass shooting up. Because it’s been a rainy autumn, we haven’t had to water it at all and I think the grass will hang on until the spring.

We also got another painting for our dining room. The dining room is red and we’ve put up some paintings of poppy flowers that match the red color. We like the photos and paintings of poppies because we took some photos of them while on our honeymoon in Denmark as they were blooming in the fields while there.  It was fortunate to find these paintings that matched the wall color (Sherwin Williams: Fire Weed). There are also photos of poppies in our living room from our honeymoon and also on a rung on the floor. I just wonder if there can be too many poppies?

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We came home last night with some new furniture for our house: a bed and an armoire. It was ordered from Brandywine Furniture (303.343.5224), about two hours North of Columbus, near Cleveland, in Amish country. A nice lady named Erin runs this place as a small business that sells Amish made furniture at great prices. Laura’s mom found Erin years ago and she and her daughters have purchased many things from her over the years.

We have a coffee table, two end tables, and now a bed and armoire. The craftsmanship is exquisite and the prices are amazing. Erin doesn’t mark up prices like other “Amish Furniture” places do. She’ll sell a dining table and six chairs for thousands less than those discount Amish places. My coffee table cost less than one with cheap particleboard and veneer from a regular furniture store. It’s incredible, and we want to buy all our furniture there. The mission style wood is timeless and will last forever. We don’t have the money to buy cheap stuff over and over, so we save up for the best, and buy it once.

Once we finish our bedroom set, we’ll look for a dining room set. Our bed is Cherry wood and the armoire is Oak. The armoire will give us additional storage space outside our bedroom and will someday be used in a guest bedroom. We’re happy with the purchases and look forward to adding to our collection, slowly, piece by piece.

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Since the passing of my Passat, we were down to one car. We wanted to search for a new car, but were in no hurry to do so, as it is cheaper to only have one. In today’s gotta-have-it-now culture, we wanted to go slow, do our research, and if the right deal came along, only then would we buy a second car.

After reading Dave Ramsey’s book: The Total Money Makeover, we’ve completely changed our finances to align them with his ideas. Because of that, we are completely debt free, and because of his book, we would be able to write a check for our new car at the dealer — no financing. Do you need a money makeover? Click the link on his book and the $16 you spend will change your life. Forever.

Because of the way our jobs work out and in our unique situation, we could have actually kept to having only one car for a while. Yes, it’s easier to have two, or even three, but we really only needed one. A lot of us Americans have gotten ourselves into trouble because we over-extend our finances because we think we need a lot of stuff. Check out GlobalRichList.com and put in your annual salary and see where you rank in the world. You’ll find that even the poorest among us are still vastly wealthier financially than most everyone else in the world. (A kid working for minimum wage at McDonalds is in the top 12% in the world.)

Those last two paragraphs kept us mindful that we didn’t want to just run out and spend more money to bring us back to status quo or even to keep up with the Joneses, but if the deal was just right, we’d make a move. (By the way, as Ramsey says, never try to keep up with the Joneses, because they’re broke anyway.)

We have been so happy with our Hyundai Sonata that we wanted to give their smaller model a chance. Everyone loves to talk about how good Honda and Toyota are, but the thing missing from that praise is the HUGE markup one pays for the name of those cars. Sure they are good and reliable, but at what price? We feel that Hyundai is the dark horse in the race (but hopefully not the dark horse and rider of the apocalypse riding across Armageddon’s plain). You get the best warranty in the industry, a car maker that will take your car back in the first year of ownership if you lose your job, a car that is built in Alabama by Americans, and a company that is not owned by and taking orders from the U.S. Government and Barack Obama.

We looked at Civics and Corollas and then laughed at the high prices/miles. Hey, if you own one of these, power to you, but we didn’t want to pay those prices. Our gamble is that Hyundai will be good on their warranty word and will have built just as good a car. My guess is that when GM and Chrysler are just a distant memory, the foreign cars, along with Ford and Saturn (owned now by Roger Penske) will be doing well. If you haven’t given Hyundai a chance, give them another look. They totally redesigned their models in 2007 and you won’t go wrong for the money.

When we searched the internet, we found some really good deals on the Elantra. After test driving two, we decided that it was a fun, roomy, affordable car that would work for us and we’d keep an eye out for one. Laura found a great looking one in Wheeling, WV, about two hours away. After calling and finding out a little about the car, we drove over today to take it for a spin. It was only driven for five months, was a 2008 with less than 14K on the odometer and was listed for $2,000 less that what both Kelley Blue Book and NADAsaid it was worth. It was clean, not a nick on it, had alloy wheels, leather steering wheel, premium sound, and best of all, as a Dallas Cowboys fan, it was the right colors, too. The only “downer” was that it is a manual transmission and Laura doesn’t (yet) drive one.

I pulled into a Subway sandwich shop parking lot to escape the smoke pouring out of the air conditioning vents. Coughing, trying to breathe and all the while saying, “No, no, no!” I wondered to myself how my faithful friend and I were going to get out of this one. My faithful steed and good friend was my 1999 VW Passat. We’d been through a lot together and had survived each time. There was the sliding in the rain toward a telephone pole when the tires grabbed at the last second and kept me on the road. There were two rear-end collisions (not on the dance floor) that the offending person’s insurance paid for. There were plenty of drives through the night to allow me to arrive safely home without a hitch. And there were countless other times where the Passat quietly, unquestioningly, and faithfully took me where I needed to go. The Passat and I always came through on the other end. On this day, as I sat on that hot parking lot, I wondered if we would make it. If he’d come through, it would take an 80 yard hail mary pass to the end zone to pull through.

The tow truck came and the guy told me he wouldn’t tow the vehicle while it was still smoldering and smoking. We never saw flames, but smoke poured from the car. A passer-by helped me take the battery cable off in case it was an electrical fire and Laura and I waited for the firemen to show up. Ladder company 25 pulled up and pulled a large hose over to the car. To me, it was as if a doctor came into a patient room with a needle the size of one’s arm. Like a needle that big, I knew that hose represented unpleasant things to come. As the firemen sprayed water into the engine compartment, and then cut out the flooring in the passenger side and sprayed water into the car, on the leather, and near the dash, I realized I’d driven my good old Passat for the final time. Memories flooded back: the test drive over Thanksgiving weekend in ’99 at Tom Wood in Indianapolis; The first speeding ticket with three of my friends with me on Indiana Highway 5; The first 1,000 miles; first dates; last dates (hah!); and on and on.

Volkswagen has fallen on hard times in the reliability sector, especially in the last 10 years or so. I’ve thought about buying another Superbeetle from the late 70’s as I know that if these are taken care of, they’ll last forever, but not so with the current iterations of VW. The final verdict was that one cylinder stopped firing and that unburned fuel went into the exhaust and caught fire there, turning the catalytic converter and exhaust manifold into see-through red hot metal which burned through the heat shield and burned the car from the underside.

It was a good run of 10 years and 107,000 miles. I hate the thought that if this hadn’t happened, there’d still be another 100k left on it. All things happen for a reason and it was obviously time for it to go. We’ll be car shopping, and if you have any recommendations for affordable around-town type cars, let me know. It’s funny how a good car “joins” the family and becomes part of us. The Passat will be missed.

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