Finally A Productive Day

Hey! It has been one of those productive days and I'm happy to report about it! :)

Okay, I'm going to hop thru my day with you, but this won't be in any particular order.......I knew the deadline was coming down to getting my car inspected, so I had to stop procrastinating and get something done today, so I took Jake with me and off we went. I knew I needed two new tires for the front of my Ford Explorer so I stopped by my favorite place and I'll tell you why this is my favorite place to go to in a second. So we get there and I walk in with Jake and we are properly greeted and asked what we needed. I explained that I need two tires and off he went on his computer punching up some tire prices for me. I told him that I needed to stay with the same tire manufacture and model (those cheap tires blow out all the time, I'm not taking that chances. Safety first!). So he tells me that it will be $204 per tire. I expected that price so I'm not surprised at all. I talked to the guy a little longer and tell him that I'm down to the last week of getting an inspection sticker and he says they can take care of that. I decline because I can get an inspection sticker anywhere and I was primarily there for the two tires.

So I passed the keys over to the guy and Jake and I go for a very local walk around the building and enjoy the weather. Nice weather today. After an hour, the service rep comes over to me and explains that my car won't pass inspection from any inspection station without new rotors and brake pads on the rear. Again, I had a hunch about the brakes needing attention......so I tell him "Easy on the price, I'm unemployed, I don't need a heart attack today." He laughs and we walk over to the computer terminal and he punching in some numbers and I'm standing there with my tummy turning wondering what is the monetary damage going to be. He says $850. I say "No Way! Forget it. I can't afford that, so he will have to be creative and change a few things around." This is where I Knew he could cut a few prices off labor and all that other good stuff. I then take out all my money (which I knew how much I had) and count it out in front of him and my cash comes to $700. He doesn't hesitate and starts discounting some labor here and there, and tells me he will throw in the state inspection sticker for free. The total price matches the cash I have on hand. Phew! I tell the guy, "No more surprises, let's get it done, slap a sticker on it, and I don't want any more surprises" He says, "No problem and I'll be good to go in about an hour. No biggie to me. So me and Jake go outside and sit on the grassy around. I snapped some pictures.....(these pictures were taken with my Blackberry)......I know, I know......

This is where we go for all our tire services, I never had a complaint

We just hanging out waiting for car to be serviced

We are enjoying the weather

We just waiting in the waiting room now.....should be almost done now

There's my car right there!!

So after everything was said and done and tallied up, we were good to go and good for one more year. And let me tell you something, driving that car home, that car has never driven so smooth and steady before. Big difference.....must of been the alignment that evened everything out. Wow, that car drives nicely now. I love it!

Okay moving on, my health insurance is coming down to the deadline too (another thing I've been sweating about)......me and my procrastination is going to be the death of me. Some people love playing against deadlines, I get stressed over it. My Cobra letter came to me in the mail with rates to continue my coverage for $441 a month. I can afford that, but I know it was over priced and someone is raking in some money somewhere. So I called up Blue Cross/Blue Shield directly today and explained my situation and asked for a quote on an insurance policy plan for just little ol' me. After going thru all the pre-determined questions easily, and for what I wanted in an insurance policy, the rate came back to me at $227 a month. Did you get that?? Let me spell it out to you......it came back as 1/2 of what the Cobra plan is. I know my doctor office visits co-pay will go from $25 a visit to $40 for unlimited office visits and my generic prescription will be $10 instead of my current $5 I have now. So one of the things I was "sweating" about was health insurance options, and the other thing I was sweating about was the inspection outcome on my car, which both is done and I am happy again and not stressed out as much. Phew!

After everything was done I decided I still had some day light time to do something else I've been putting off, so I went to SuperCuts and got my hair trimmed......I was looking like crap and feeling like crap and need to work on getting myself back in socially acceptable standards. I looked like hell, cause in the past 16 days, I've been thru hell. So, I went to SuperCuts and they washed and trimmed an inch off the back and sides and I feel so much better. It had been 9 weeks since I've gotten a haircut. Yes, I keep track of these things. After I left there, I stopped at Walgreens drug convenient store and picked up my favorite hair coloring kit in a box for $4.25 (Oh, the hair cut cost me $18.95), so I got a medium brown color and went home and colored my hair myself in under an hour. Piece of cake and, again, I'm feeling better.

Back to health insurance again, I currently have Medco for prescription needs and I had seen on the news that Medco and Express Scripts are merging - here's the link for it. I found it interesting....

Okay, moving on......I'm not too impressed about the contents of the dollar store I went to recently.......you will know exactly what I mean when I post these pictures.......

It's JULY people!!!!!!

Hmmmmm, Halloween merchandise on shelves in JULY???? Oh Please!! Anyone else with me on this one??

So, this was found at the dollar store we stopped at recently. I like the dollar store, you never know what you are going to find for a "dollar" :)

The last thing I'm gong to "vent" about is that I'm fluent in Wordpress, but there are specific reasons I don't use them any longer. Now, my point is that WordPress has an easy user-friendly Blackberry App to hop right into your WordPress blog and make changes or add new postings. BlogSpot doesn't have an App (grrrrrr....), so what they have done is given us a specific email address attached to our blog to post blog segments with pictures via email. Now, the problem I'm having with this is that my email account on my Blackberry allows me to upload one picture per email, so my blog postings will be accommodated with my favorite (blog post related) picture. But if I do it from my laptop, I can post many pictures at once. I haven't try posting a blog entry from my Blackberry BlogSpot email address yet, but I'm going to try this and see how it appears on here. So bare will me if you see something a tad different with a blog post. I can only hope it will appear okay. But, I'm open to new avenues on getting blog posting posted here and I'm new to BlogSpot so I can't wait to see how user-friendly that will be.

Okay, this it is my blog post for today, and I'm soooo happy I got more than I expected done today. The rest of the week will be dedicating my attention to setting up my new insurance policy so I can continue to have access to my doctor and prescriptions if needed.

Phew.....okay have a good night.....bug you tomorrow! :)