New car

Tom's car finally decided she'd had enough. The engine still goes great but the poor body is just worn out. I guess that's what happens when we get old. So, we are retiring our little Subaru. Kinda sad since that was our first big purchase as a couple and we've had the car since just before we got married. Kind of amazing. In all reality we haven't been very nice to it either. Yet she still goes. 8 years and over 100,000 miles since we got it.

We just purchased her replacement last night. We decided the new car had to have these requirements: under 100,000 miles, decent gas milage (20 mpg or higher), have some cargo space, space for the kid and the dog, and be high enough off the ground we could quit breaking our backs puting Bear in his car seat. So that left us with pretty much two options; a minivan or SUV. Well, we ended up with the SUV. Neither Tom nor I wanted to completely surrender to the minivan look.:) We bought a 2001 Mazda Tribute with 80,000 miles on it. It is almost exactly a Ford Escape. We like the way it drives and love the amount of space it has. Plus it met our price requirement of being $7500 or less. It was less so we went and got a little bit of insulation for the house too. Yippee! I love tax credits and refunds. Finally some money to do some of the things we've needed to do.

We'll see how much space this batch of insulation covers and then see how much we need to add to it. I'm almost positive we'll have to add but we shall see. Then maybe we can lower our scary gas bills. Amazing what it takes to heat an old house. Even not being a very big one. Granted we have some pretty big windows though. Along with the almost no insulation upstairs, and none downstairs. Continuous projects for us. We'll never run out of things to do.