Short post this week, owing mainly to a busy day Saturday.
I really wanted to do the German Pot Roast recipe on the smoker this week, but the forecast was for 105° and I just did not want to mess around with fire in that heat.
It stayed beastly hot this week, as you can see. Heat indexes stayed over 130° for most of the last two weeks. I had no desire to do much of anything outside. I did end up doing some Grilled Lime Chicken Wednesday night. It was a little cooler by the time I got the grill fired up, and since I used the gas side, I wasn’t as hot for as long. Pretty tasty stuff, too.
After the boys and I spent Saturday morning taking down a fence at the ministry center, Diana and I made our way to Tulsa to trade out her Chevy Cobalt. We’d picked it up almost exactly two years ago as a temporary car for her and it’s been showing its age for a while now. A couple of other problems popped up in the last few weeks so she started searching Carmax’s website. She found a 2017 Malibu LT with just 40,000 miles on it that looked very promising. We test-drove it Saturday, decided we liked it, and brought it home after a celebratory stop at Dairy Queen.
This was our first Carmax purchase and it was a very good experience for us. We didn’t have the typical financing runaround where the sales guy has to get the price approved by the sales manager, then go see the financing guy. We dealt with one person, Meagan, from start to finish, and she was great. It took a little less time than our last car-buying experience when I bought the Subaru, and that one was a cash sale. The Malibu included financing, but the only hiccup was that we wanted to title it in the name of our trust. Apparently, that’s too difficult for Bank of America to figure out how to do. We still got the car we wanted though, and at a reasonable price. I call that a win.
And I really can’t get over the absolute chaos in college football this week. The Big Ten’s expansion in 1990 to eleven teams was a huge deal back then, but I don’t think anyone could have foreseen the changes that happened this week among the conferences. 18 teams in the Big Ten? Unreal.
Writing
I’ve decided I’m not going to the 20 Books conference this year. Our Hawaii vacation falls the week after; I’d get off the plane from Vegas Friday night and get on the plane to Hawaii Saturday morning, and that’s a little much. It’s still a tempting conference, but just not this year. I feel like I need to get more writing finished, too. I’ve got too many open projects right now.
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