Updates, Part 1

So whats new with us?

I apologize its been awhile since my last post.  2015 has been a tough one so far.  Will and I started out the year taking a trip to Chattanooga to plan out our goals for the year.  It was a fun time even though it rained most of our trip.  Little did we know what turns the year would actually take.

In February, we got a dog!  His name was Watson.  We got him from the local animal shelter.  He was a White German Shepherd mix (or full breed…not sure).  He was a good dog and super smart!  The first night we left him alone to go out to eat, we put him in his crate.  When we got back, Watson was in his crate, but his door was open.  We then started noticing little pieces of chewed up paper around the living room.  He had figured out how to get out of his crate, wandered the house, then put himself back in the crate when he heard us coming home.  Will and I were laughing so hard, we couldn’t really be mad at him.  He had this weird thing about hardwood floors…as in he was terrified of them.  He only liked being on the carpet, which was unfortunate because all of the doors leading outside had hardwood or tile in front of it.  This made taking him outside difficult.  We finally had to put blankets on the hardwood to get him to step on it.  The nice thing was that he was already trained to go outside to do his business.  He didn’t seem to know any other commands like sit, but that’s ok.  He also didn’t shed at all, which is beyond amazing for a German Shepherd.  And then he started to get sick.  We thought at first he had kennel cough or he was having problems switching to the new dog food.  Essential oils seemed to calm his cough and his anxieties so we thought he would be on the mend quickly.

Then a storm came in with snow.  It wasn’t snowing like it did for the snowpocolypse the year before, but because of the snowpocalypse, everyone wanted to make sure they were prepared this year.  The city shut down, and the mayor was recommending that everyone leave work early to be home before the snow started sticking.  So I left work early, stopped by walmart to get some ground beef (we always used to make a ground beef/rice mix whenever we had a dog that wasn’t feeling well) and headed home.  Then, when I was halfway home, an idiot rear-ended me.  He completely smashed in my trunk which popped out the lights.  It also made one of my tires blow.  I’m thankful that even though he pushed me into traffic, no one else hit me.  Ironically, I had been thinking about doing a post on facebook, celebrating my cars 20th birthday but decided against it because I figured the second I posted it someone would total it.
It was totaled anyway.  We took it to the recommended repair shop and the costs were too much.  But lets go back to Watson.  That night, Watson started to throw up about every 30 minutes and we realized that it was more than just kennel cough.  However, because the snow was coming down like crazy, we weren’t able to take him to the vet.  Thankfully, in the morning, there wasn’t any ice on the roads and we took him.  It turned out that he got parvo at the pound but didn’t show symptoms until we brought him home.  He stayed at the vet for about 4 days and they did everything they could for him (we have the bill to prove it) but he ended up dying 9 days after we got him.

To make matters worse, we then had to deal with the headache that comes with a car accident, which meant a lot of phone calls between the insurance company, the repair shop, and the rental agency.   It took a couple of weeks for the repair shop to determine that it was indeed totaled.  Once they decided that, we had a week to find a replacement car for me before my rental was up.  That was one stressful week.  It was difficult finding a car within our price range and parameters at a dealer, and people on craigslist were all overpricing their cars by about $2000 (which we were willing to haggle, but when people are that delusional about the worth of their vehicle, its not worth it).  Thankfully, about 30 minutes after we turned in my rental, we found a good little vehicle to purchase at a Lexus dealership.

This was an instance where I am thankful that we went through Dave Ramsey’s financial peace a few years ago when we were first married.  Because of that, Will had already written it into our budget to start saving for a car.  And while we weren’t offered much for my Camry, we had enough in our emergency fund to pay off the vet bill and to put towards a car for me (we had originally planned to replace my car in August so we weren’t fully saved to replace my car by half a year). I’m thankful this allowed us to pay with cash instead of getting a loan or leasing a car because we are saving so much in the long run.  Paying with cash also gave us extra haggling power (didn’t actually think it would).  We didn’t realize that the price we saw online on the car we ended up buying was already the dealers absolute lowest price.  It had sat in their lot for awhile and they had brought it down $2000 already.  So we were hoping when we saw it online, that we would be able to convince them to come down a little further.  It was listed just under our max budget, but with taxes and fees, it would go over.  The car was obviously well taken care of, was less than 5 years old and didn’t have that many miles on it so we were comfortable getting it and we sat down to negotiate with them.  The dealer explained that they couldn’t come down any further (and by our research the car was obviously very well priced so we knew we didn’t have much to negotiate with) and just before we walked away, Will said one last time what are max budget was and started dropping literal wads of cash on the table.  The dealers eyes got really big, his jaw dropped, and then he started giggling like a little girl.  He had never seen more than a couple of hundred of dollars cash in his whole life (you would think he would have, working at a Lexus dealership because the cars they sell are far fancier than the used Hyundai I bought from them).  So he looked at us and told us that he would see what he could do, he walked to the back and a few seconds later we heard another guy exclaim “seriously!”  A few minutes later, he came back with a sheet of paper and said it was the absolute best that he could do.  Will and I hung our heads because we thought he was referring to the price he gave us earlier.  He had to point to the new price for us to realize that they had come down to our max budget.  That was a weight off our shoulders because it had been a very stressful week car shopping.
That just leaves how I felt after the car accident.  It took about 2 months of going to the chiropractor but I’m finally feeling more like my normal self.  Everything combined though, its been a very draining season, mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually, and financially.  I’ve had a number of people ask me if we have done any house projects recently and we haven’t…and all this is the reason why.  Others have asked us if we are going to get another dog…and we will, eventually.  The problem with parvo, is it can hang out in the soil for a year so we want to be cautious in getting another dog so we don’t have the same experience again.  Others have asked if I’m liking my car, and I am.  It drives similarly to the camry and has similar features so it wasn’t much of an adjustment, though there is a small part of me that misses the reliable car that I had for almost a decade, since college, and had another 100,000 miles left in it.