New Rides, Both Real And Virtual!

It was a good weekend for acquisition this weekend, and to that end, I, well we, made two. The first I will describe, and the less important of the two, was a virtual one. As I mentioned before, I play World of Warcraft. I was playing on Friday night and I was looting my last two solo kills before bed. On one of the bodies of the Naga Explorers, I found an item called "Boots of Avoidance". I saw that the writing was in purple. Now this was going to be a big find! In WoW, equipment in gray text are non-magical, and are of course pretty common. They are usable, but very basic. Then there is green text. "Green" equipment has some magic in it, and is often pretty useful. It is not very common, but common enough so that the typical character is mostly "green". (No, that is not the actual color, it's just the text description.) The next Plate armor, so I couldn't use them myself, being a Hunter, a class that can't wear plate. The next step is blue. I am level 44 of 60 and I have actually gotten only two blue items or so, maybe three at the most, plus one from a quest. They are around, but they are rare. Then there are "purple" or so called "epic items". This is what I found. In the course of gaining levels to level 44 I had been able to accumulated just over 50 gold. I sold the item for 90 gold in the in-game auction house on Saturday. Training to be able to use a mount and then buying it costs 90 gold, and is a sign that you've "made it" to the higher end of the virtual coolness ladder in World of Warcraft, not to mention that it makes travel faster and more fun. On Sunday I bought my new ride, a giant white ram. Yes, my character is a dwarf, that now rides a white ram. You don't have to understand. Just be happy for me! Here is a picture of a dwarf on a ram from the game, but obviously not me or mine, since my ram is white and my beard is bluish-black and more neatly kept than this guy's.



Now for the real ride. On Saturday, my wife and I went to Carmax to browse cars. We knew that we needed to get a car for her soon because they are discontinuing the bus route that used to take her to the Metro (DC area subway system), into DC. We could no longer get by with one car (a blue 2001 Volkswagen Passat we bought new) he had already set up a very good financing rate through E-Loan. We had a nice young guy from South Africa named Irwin helping us. We looked at some cars, and Chris really loved a 2004 Mazda 6 that was on the lot. Carmax has an interesting business model. Their salespeople are not on a percentage commission. They are on a per vehicle commission. This allows them to focus on what the customer needs, which is great. The other thing is that there is no haggling. This could of course be a very bad thing, and I was a little skeptical about it, so whatever the price was I wanted to make sure that we were getting good value for the money. We went back home and I checked online on Edmunds to make sure it was a reasonable price. It was, so we went back and got it. Below is the actual car. You like it?