A Ford Crown Vic would also have a lot of room and are very tough mechanically, but they suck down gas and are big. On the plus side, watch traffic slow down around you.

Oh man, that drove me insane once when we had a Crown Vic as a rental. Every time you'd come up behind traffic on the freeway everyone would slow down and hold steady at or below the speed limit. So aggravating.

That's funny about the Crown Vic. I hadn't thought about that although I do the slowing down thing too.

My parents have a Taurus. DH isn't comfortable driving it, but Brendon isn't his size. I'll have him size check.

which is going to be paid off fully next week

Woo!

Right??? Like Patrick Stewart in Othello.

I saw that! And also Avery Brooks as Othello with, oh, shit, what's his name? Homicide: LOTS guy... as Iago. Andre Brauer. So much awesome.

Oh, man. Laura, you car search prompted me to go look for my desired vehicle, and a dealer in Oakland has exactly what I want: a pre-2004 manual Jeep Wrangler with less than 100,000 miles: [link] Pretty color, too. Now to mentally justify the expense....

Our Ford Focus fits 6'6" mr. flea. It's a 2000. They are available pretty cheap - I think ours with 120K miles is valued at about $2500. And it runs fine. Well, as well as it ever did.

Did Avery Brooks rock Othello as hard as I imagine he did?

Star Wars as retold by someone who has not seen it: [link] (YouTube video) Warning: Don't be eating or drinking anything while watching.

I never seen Star Wars.

ducks

Yeah, we do automatic payments for all our bills, too. But we do it through the bank, and not where the vendor is authorized to take money directly out, because we feel like that may be prone to abuse. So we still have to pay attention to the bills, to make sure we're paid current (and sometimes we pay over the amount accidentally) but we get the ease of not having to deal with paper, and we hit the deadlines. It means we can do everything that way, including our giving, because the bank will send anyone a check we want them to.

We also have a bi-monthly household budget meeting. We can tell when we don't have it, 'cause that's the only time we get into trouble anymore. And we used to get into trouble, let me just say.

We're in the market for a car, but I just can't figure out what we can get. We want something smaller with better mileage because most of our locations now will store our instruments, so we don't need to do all that hauling all the time. But we live on a very dirt road, so we need something 4x4 or all wheel at the least that can handle the clay when it turns to mud. Anything that will do that a) doesn't have that great mileage and b) we can't afford.

Hallo. Am at KBD's on the iPhone. Didn't get to the thrift store this morning but did pay my rent and as a reward got to hold her lethally cute 9.5 month daughter. Such a smile!!