We've spent a good part of the last few days shopping...
There have been three primary shopping focuses...
Furniture - this has been the easiest so far. Jeanie decided she is ready for a new couch. Fortunately, she knew exactly where she wanted to go - Bassett Furniture in Jacksonville, and had a pretty good idea of what she wanted. The best part? They had free coffee and cookies, so I sat and enjoyed the food while Jeanie made her selections. As with our previous couch, Jeanie elected to order one, so she could customize it. Bassett offers quite a few options and has a pretty cool link on their site which allows you to design your couch online. Delivery should be in about six weeks.
We still have some more furniture shopping to do - matching comfy chairs or a love seat for the living room, and a new mattress for the second guest room - but those will have to wait for a bit.
Electronics - on the way home from the furniture store, we noticed a sign on a Radio Shack indicating that the store was closing in nine days, and they were offering discounts of 70% - 90%. Of course, I had to go in and see what was available. Much of the inventory was already gone, but there were a number of interesting items. I ended up picking up a replacement 12v power supply for the one that died for the Scanner for $2.00. I also picked up replacement light bulbs for a lighted magnifier which had just died a few days before - 2 for $0.16! They also had quite a few cordless phone batteries for $2.00 each, but I didn't know exactly which ones we needed. The power supply for the scanner ended up being a good purchase - I had broken down and purchased the replacement capacitor and fuse for the old power supply and had replaced them, but as soon as I plugged the "repaired" power supply in, the fuse blew. Since I have a new unit, I decided not to pursue trying to fix the old one.
When we returned home, I went around and wrote down the details of each phone's battery. I recorded the volts, (milli)amps, number of cells, and battery dimensions.
The following day, we drove back to the radio shack and purchased five batteries for $2.00 each, a universal AC/DC power adapter for $2.00, another set of magnifier lamps, and a six pack of Jabra ear gel replacements for the headset I use with my cell phone. I didn't need the ear gels (at least I didn't know I did), but they were only $0.79 so I figured "what the heck." Strangely enough, the very next day, when I went to use my headset, I noticed that the ear gel had fallen off - what great luck!
The one thing I forgot to record with the cordless phone batteries was the specifics of the connector. I didn't even realize I needed to do this until I started trying to install the new batteries. Some were fine, but others weren't. I solved the problem for the "weren'ts" by cutting the connectors off the old batteries, cutting the connectors off the new batteries, and soldering the old connectors to the new batteries. Fortunately, I remembered to slide the heat-shrink tubing on the wires before I soldered the connections on!
The one other great "deal" we got at Radio Shack were a handful of "$10 off a $20 purchase" coupons. I want to purchase a different de-soldering tool at Radio Shack which just so happens to cost just over $10, so I need to decide what $10 worth of "free" stuff I'll be picking up with one of the coupons.
Automobile - The bulk of the time was spent doing online research and then trudging from dealership to dealership to test drive cars. We decided that it was time to get a new vehicle. The selection criteria include: gets good gas mileage, is easy to get in/out of (as opposed to the Durango which requires a big step up or the Stealth which requires sitting down low), can easily carry a reasonable amount of "stuff" without too much hassle, and can accommodate both of the dog's crates. This pretty much focused us into the "crossover" or compact SUV category. So far, we have looked at the Dodge Caliber, Pontiac Vibe, Saturn Vue, Hyundai Tuscon, Mitsubishi Outlander, Toyota RAV4, Mazda 3 and Mazda 5. We also looked at Suzuki, but weren't impressed enough to even remember the model name of what we drove; KIA, but the dealership in Jacksonville didn't have a RIO5 on the lot and informed us that their compact SUV didn't have the options we wanted in the 4 cylinder model (the 6 got mediocre mileage); Subaru, but the dealership was closed and the prices seemed relatively high and the mileage relatively low; and Honda which seemed about the same as Subaru.
After all the test drives, the cars tend to blur together a bit, but I think our top three contenders are the Vue, Tuscon and RAV4. Saturn is supposed to release a new hybrid Vue within a few months, so that is a factor we are considering as well. Next step will be to put together a spreadsheet so I can more easily compare the various models, then go drive to contenders each one more time. Then we'll figure out what we "should" pay for the desired vehicle using various Internet resources, and then let the pricing games begin...
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Posted by David at July 20, 2006 03:01 PM