Ramona has a quilt show this coming week-end. Barbara Vanice, the local Gammill dealer at The Quilted Rose, will be loaning me one of her demo tables for my longarm quilting promotion booth at the quilt show. We did the same thing last year but my friend, Cheryl, and her husband (a truck-owner) were responsible for getting the table from San Diego to Ramona. No small feat, it is about 37 miles away and weighs a metric butt-ton.
Get in the time machine and go back in time to 2002: I decided to buy a comfortable SUV or truck when I moved to the country. My thinking was that since I have to cummute 100 miles a day, I'm not going to squeeze myself into some lawnmover propelled phonebooth. This was going to be my car so I got to choose. I took my husband and son (21 at the time) along for all that mechanical questioning stuff that I did not want to get involved in. As I stepped out of my car, I saw a shiny green Chevy Silverado club cab across the lot. It was love at first sight. I told my husband, "You can talk to the salesman and ask all those car-type questions but I am driving this truck home tonight." It was two years old. I'm too cheap to buy a new car. I loved that truck for 3 and a half years and loved it even more when I paid it off early.
Ok, back in the time machine and set it for February 2007: My son, a journeyman plumber doing construction plumbing, gets a new job. Carrying his tools of the trade around in his mustang was getting a bit tough, especially when their 2nd son was born. Car seats take up lots of room. I decided to give him my truck and buy myself a Chevy Trailblazer. He loves that truck.
Back in the time machine and go to a week ago: I called the rent-a-truck places and was astounded to learn that it was going to cost me $29 a day and 69 cents a mile to rent a truck to move that quilt demo table. Are you kidding me?
Here is the math: $29 X 4 = $120 and .69 X 100 = $69.00 So about $190 to rent a silly truck for the weekend. Hmmm, maybe I could borrow my son's (my) truck for the weekend.
Two days ago: We did the trade, my 2006 Trail Blazer for his (was mine) Silverado. We did this trade in the dark at his job-site at 5:45 a.m. As soon as I sat in it, I noticed that it felt lower than I remembered. After a block of driving it, I was car sick from bouncing around in a vehicle that needs shocks so badly. 3 kids (yes, he has a daughter now, too) are more important than shocks for his truck. Well, I agree with that. They are, afterall, my grandchildren. But back to my truck. I knew without looking that it would need gas so stopped to get gas. Some things never change no matter how much they grow up. Working construction frequently requires driving on unpaved job sites. Under the harsh lights at the gas station, I could see that my green beauty was dusty and dirty. So sad. The more I looked at the truck, the more reality set in. $190 to rent a truck was cheap compared to what it was going to cost me to replace those shocks ($770).
Here I was trying to save some money and ended up spending more. Pay me now or pay me later. The only good thing about it is that now they will be riding around in a more comfortable truck. And I also learned that I clearly still have issues about gift-giving.
No comments:
Post a Comment