Well, I took a vacation day yesterday to do some Christmas shopping, but after the ancient car her dad gave us started leaking in the rain and got one of its mirrors knocked off by a passing car, K. decided we should go car shopping instead. It was my first time shopping for cars since I bought my used Ford LTD almost twenty years ago and the first time shopping for a new car for either of us. Since most of our driving is in the city, we decided to get a hybrid.

We test drove three cars. The Ford Fusion hybrid was an amazing car with some really neat gadgets, but at nearly 29k a lot more than we wanted to pay. The Toyota Prius was the car we expected to buy, but frankly it did not impress us. It felt too fragile and toylike, the controls too purely electronic, like playing a video game. The winner, we think, will be the Honda Insight. Not only does it drive exactly like our current car (a 98 Cutlass), it was also the cheapest one we drove. We even managed to unintentionally haggle the price down another two thousand dollars (to 19k) simply by repeating our intention to go home and sleep on it. We're still sleeping on it, and doing some more research, but I think we'll have a new car soon. The only down side is that they only offered us a hundred bucks for our old car, so instead we're going to give it to WXPN, our excellent local public radio music station, for a tax write-off.