Being the chronicles of Divinar the Lost

8:26am: We have been assimilated. We are now among the Minvan People.
Yes, we bought a minivan. Well, a not-so-mini minivan.
A 2006 Toyota Sienna LE. Blue-gray exterior, gray interior.
Seating for 6 comfortably, 7 if three are skinny or real good friends.
With the back seats up, there's almost as much cargo space as Cyn's Forester.
With the back seats down, there's more room than my entire Legacy.
And with the middle seats out, I can fit an entire sheet of plywood in there. (actually, I could put a few sheets vertically between the middle seats, and still carry 5 people!)

It's one of the only minivans with AWD, and we still believe we'll go back to ski in Tahoe again.

The dealer's sticker was $17,600.
Their internet asking price was $16,891.
We got them down to $15,999.

They're a Ford dealer. They don't know about Toyotas. They didn't know what options it actually had, and left them out of the price calculator.
Kelly Blue Book on that van, in the condition it was actually in, was $19,020.
KBB Private Party value was $16,820.

The passenger-side power door didn't work. They didn't even know it WAS a power door, but after we hammered them down, I got them to agree to pay the local Toyota dealership to fix it as part of the sale. But on the way home, I found the button that locks it closed, and it works fine now, so I let them off the hook.

It has a Class III tow hitch, with electronic braking system. (I don't think I'll ever use this, but it would have raised the price a grand or so)

We probably should have bought something like this in 2005 instead of Cyn's Forester - but she needed a car fast after the (paid off) Jetta was totaled.

It doesn't handle quite as well as my Legacy. Big surprise. But it does handle very smoothly, and I'm getting used to sitting up high above the road.

They only offered us $1500 on the old Legacy, KBB says it's worth $3000-$3500 as a trade-in, so we'll be selling it privately.

Last year we were planning to get my mom's 2005 Dodge Caravan, at a severely discounted price, but Mom decided she was going to keep it and run it into the ground out there instead of buying herself another new car next year.

Oh well.
With her van we might have had to keep the Legacy for ski trips anyway, as hers wasn't AWD.

We have an offer for the Legacy. If it falls through, it's a 2000 Legacy wagon with 108K miles. Runs great, will probably go another 100K, body is in fair shape.

7:43am: Welcome Mikey!
Michael Kenneth Hansen (Mikey) was born at 8:08 AM Monday, May 12, 2008.
He was one ounce heavier than JD, at 9 lbs, 6.5 oz, the same length, 21", but was more "challenging", as the doctors put it.
Like his big brother, he was breech. He was also "frank breech" and he had the cord wrapped around his neck twice, which would have made things a bit impossible had we actually tried to push him out vaginally. *shudder*

Mommy and Mikey are doing well - she's already bored and wants me to bring in her current detective novel, and one of her books on Oracle programming.

3:46pm: New Job part two
It's taken them almost a month to do it, but they finally got me a cubicle, a phone number, and a computer over at the Vulcan Taxi Association (*snicker*)


I was originally going to be going there Monday, Wednesday and Fridays, but that is in direct conflict with our new engineer's schedule, so I'll be working there Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays.


(Thursday I won't be in before 9, I have to take JD to the sitter that day, Maga has a weekly meeting that morning.)


OF course, I'm way behind on the project. Just because I didn't have a computer to work on doesn't mean I shouldn't have been able to do the drafting, right? And my boss's boss pulling me off everything else to put on two "dog-and-pony" shows this month for bigwigs from other companies couldn't possibly reduce my drafting speed...

7:37am: Me? A Hippie?
( Silly Hippy Test from Kat's journal. I fail )

4:22pm: New Job, sorta
We lost an engineer last year. Unfortunately, he didn't die, he quit.

So the powers that be here decided that I am to be sacrificed, and sent me from my warm cave where I rule as the IT God out to the offices of the Vulcan Taxi Association (*snicker*) where I am reduced to just CADD work.

If only I could do it.

I spent the morning being shuffled from desk to desk, flunky to flunky. One lady wasn't in today, and she doesn't have an assistant who can actually *do* anything if her boss is out.

So, I got my photo ID badge on a string - wheeee!

I don't have:
A cubicle. There aren't any where I'm supposed to be working, so it looks like they're going to shuffle me off in "the other building" - a 5 minute walk from my boss and co-worker.

A phone. I'll get one when they settle on my cubicle.

A computer. There is an 800 MHz P-3 sitting in the cubicle I'm likely to get. Even my boss agrees that I need something better than that if I'm to do the work they expect.

A username/password to access the computer with. And I'm not even to be in a cube with a computer that's logged in by someone else unless that person is using it.

A security badge to open the doors. So if I get up to pee, I can't get back into my section unless I call someone on my cellphone to let me back in.

The worst part? Most people seem to think of this as a PROMOTION! Hell, I went to school to program computers, not just draw on the screen! I'm already getting bored.

12:54pm: OK, my first quiz

Final Score: 145.875