It didn't take me long after I'd had some sleep to realize that instead of buying Scotty a car it makes more sense to loan him money for one till he gets a better job. With that decision made I may raise the limit on how much I'm willing to let him spend on something I think is a good deal.

I probably shouldn't have yet but I stopped at the local GM dealer's on my way home from Vincennes this afternoon.

In the spring of '04 when I first started getting a VA pension I very nearly ended up buying a slightly used '03 Dodge Stratus; the financing fell through at the last minute but not till I'd had time for an extended test drive and fallen madly in love with the thing. That probably explains a lot about why I hope Scotty will end up buying the '03 Stratus on the local GM dealer's lot. If he does I won't end up driving it much, if at all, but it would sure look nice sitting in our driveway.

I very nearly yielded to temptation and made an impulse buy for myself while I was at the GM dealer's. About the only thing that stopped me was remembering I'd said I'd let my sister make the final decision about what to buy since she'll be driving it a lot more than I will. They have two low mileage 2008 G6s on the lot, one a 4 door with a 4 cylinder engine and one a 2 door with a 6 cylinder. If they'd had a 4 door with a six I probably would have just bought it on the spot. My sister went back up town later and thinks she'd like the 2 door better but we're going to have the salesman get us prices on both, with and without the car I have now as a trade-in, taking into account that I can pay cash and eliminate the hassle of trying to line up credit. I guess I'd rather have the sporty model myself but it's more expensive and I want to find out what my options really are. Regardless of what we buy I'll probably follow through with my plan to rent a car for my trip to Texas this winter.

***

Part of my thinking about the car situation is that as long as I don't buy new it won't cost me more than I I'm willing to gamble to change my mind about what I want in a few months. That being the case, I told my sister a little bit ago to get in touch with the salesman we've been working with (She's known him for years, he has a good rep around town, and he earned a sale 4 yrs ago then we couldn't get credit.) and tell him we're very, very serious about the two door 3.5L G6 GT we both looked at this afternoon. If some sort of totally unforeseeable financial disaster comes along in a few months we can sell it and otherwise we'll have something here we both like a lot. If we're patient we might find something we like a little better, but not much, by waiting, but I've been waiting about as long as I can handle. It's been 20 years (since my '87 Le Baron fell apart before it had any right to) since I had a car I really liked and that's long enough.

Now if we can just get Scotty into something else before he has time to spend enough time in the G6 to trash it out like he has the car I have now. I'll probably go take a closer look at the Stratus I mentioned earlier tomorrow afternoon and unless there's something wrong with it push him hard toward buying it.

***

Next issue: Computers.

I mentioned before that we bought a computer from Rent One yesterday. That's not someplace I'd normally go shopping for a computer but keeping peace in the family required doing something fairly soon, my sister stopped by to check out rentals, and it was a good deal. On the other hand, it's not something I'm ever going to consider very impressive; even with the memory maxed out it's still going to be slow compared to mine. Enter Scotty again, probably. When I bought the computer I have now I moved the one I'd been using (the one that just died) to the front room for the family to use and moved the one one of my Dogs gave me a couple of years ago from there to his room. There were already indications then that the hard drive in that one was on the way out and about a month ago it gave up the ghost completely; he's been without a computer in his room since then. Sometime reasonably soon I think I'll buy a new computer with specs I like for the family and give him the one we just bought, which I consider good enough for his limited computer needs. After I've done that so I can mix and match and experiment without being a major hassle for anyone I'll see if I can turn the two dead computers we have now into one working machine and either keep it around as a spare or give it to my sister's best friend and her daughter, who has major health problems and no computer at all right now.