27 Weeks and Closing

I realized yesterday that we only have nine weeks left.  We've been doing lots of things we don't usually do, like preparing a nursery, but the part of my brain that deals with emotional perception hasn't caught on just yet.  I've been tidying up the extra room; I do that all the time.  I've been building furniture; I do that all the time.  I've been painting walls; I do that all the time.  I've been painting and decoupaging decorative canvases; I do that all the time.  I'm used to pregnancy being a sort of incidental bodily function that eventually resolves itself and disappears without any long-term consequences.  Eventually it will seem real, but in the meantime there's lots of puttering around to do.

I'm still going in every week for a progesterone injection, and every two weeks now I have to get my cervix looked at just to be sure nothing untoward is happening.  So far, so good.  JoJo apparently weighs 2+ pounds and is right on target.

Habemus New Car!

For some reason, we always end up shopping for new cars in January, and with no time to lose.  Our old trusty rusty 2009 Hyundai Elantra's mishap on Christmas Eve apparently resulted in so much structural damage that it was declared a total loss.  It was almost a death in the family; it was my first car, it drove me to Georgia for our wedding, shipped out to California with us, then drove us back to the east coast.  RIP, little car.

Fortunately, USAA is giving us the full retail Blue Book value, which is just short of $10,000.  With this knowledge, enough cash for a decent down payment and a rental which needs to be returned very soon, we trotted off to Carmax and proceeded to shop like we always do, like the entire lot is on fire.

We had some possibilities in mind.  We found several candidates online this morning, including two 2009 Hyundai Elantras with lower mileage.  One was white, and we almost wanted to get it just to make Gandalf jokes.  But neither of them was actually on the lot we were visiting.  We had almost decided to settle for an unfortunately painted powder blue one, but it turned out to be manual, and we're strictly automatic people.  The first one we looked at in the flesh turned out to be a rather drab and disappointing white 2009 Hyundai Accent with no radio and old-fashioned crank windows.  We weren't set on a Hyundai, but the selection was what it was.  We were about to go look at some Kias, but then we saw it.  Across the lane was a beautiful black 2012 Hyundai Accent, the exact car we had originally set out to buy new three Januaries ago.

 

It was love at first sight.  We had to go a bit over budget, but we didn't care at that point.  We were driving away with it, and that was the end of it.  Turns out it was a fleet car in its previous life, half as old and half as well-traveled as Dave's old car.  I always felt just a teensy bit bad for sniping the new car out from under him back in 2012 when we bought the new Elantra, so now it's his turn to have the spiffy new wheels.  And now we have a very fashionable complementary black and white set of 2012 Hyundais.