What The Cell?!?

What else can be said about cellphones that hasn't been said over and over? Am I about to trumpet the virtues of the iPhone, rant about students randomly calling their parents from school on their "against policy" phones, or talk about my wife's need to upgrade to a "dumb-phone" with a keyboard since she texts regularly now?

No, nothing so exciting, just plain laziness. In my house, I'm the fetcher. Josh is the fetcher in training, but he's only good for small pieces of trash and papers off the printers at this point. So anything else is really up to me. This was especially significant the last 2 summers, since Camille has had back surgery both of them. In general, its not bad with the exception of the cellphone issue! We've not had a landline for a number of years now and are quite happy with simply having our individual cellphones. However, there is a fly in the ointment. I hate running across the house to get/find it!

We're all familiar with this drill. Phone rings, and your spouse looks at you helplessly since she's laid up from back surgery, you run across the house trying in vain to get to the phone before it goes to voicemail, you can't find it or you drop it while trying to get the darned thing open and it....goes to VM! Or better yet, you are talking and have to go into another room since the kids are being loud and the signal is lost or voice quality goes into the Darth Vader mode since you don't have enough bars in enough places.

I used to have a solution to this issue, back in the dark pre-GSM days when I had this cradle that I put my phone in, then it sent the signal to a 2-line Semiens deskphone system that distributed to all of the handsets strewn throughout the house. The cellphone stayed in it's cradle where it got charged and stayed put in a place where it got a good signal. Unfortunately, those cradles have gone the way of the DoDo; so what to do?

Recently I ran across a system called "Link-to-Cell" put out by Panasonic implemented in a DECT 6.0 expandable phone system. Unfortunately, the retail on a 2 handset system was around $120 (well beyond "Frugal" guidelines for phone items). So I kept looking on eBay regularly and sure enough, they sold for less there, but still in the around $50 range. I couldn't pull the trigger on it, but was able to wait out an auction for a set that didn't sell. I contacted the buyer and "low and behold" he offered it to me for $30 including shipping! I jumped all over that and PayPaled the payment.

Yesterday, it arrived and I've been playing with it ever since. It's really very simple. You connect it to up to two Bluetooth enabled cellphones and the little box sends the signal to the wireless handsets in the house. The phone connects when you go into the room, you put the phone down whereever it gets good signal and you're done! From there you just use the normal-phone looking handsets just like a regular phone.

Frugal Propellerhead Car Buying (AKA I hate new car dealerships)!

Yeah, I know; it's kind of an oxy-moron, but it was time. Our old Civic had soldiered on for 10 years of abuse and neglect. And at nearly 125,000+ miles, it was still running well, but on borrowed time before things would start to break....even on a Honda. So you do what any good frugal propellerhead would do; clean it up, invest a minimal amount to fix a few details and sell it in mid-August when parents are out frantically looking around for a car for the new driver in the family.

Sure enough, within 24hrs of putting in an ad on our school districts online employee flea market, it was sold for $4000. Not bad for a 10 year old car with it share of dings and rough spots. Now came the fun part; the dreaded "new" car shopping. We had decided that the current low price of gas is an anomaly so we were targeting a replacement with gas mileage better than a 1999 Honda Civic! It got a real world 28 city and 35 or so highway! So we were either going to have to look at "penalty boxes" or hybrids. Since we were also targeting something that was a little more roomy on the inside, the answer was obviously going to be hybrids.

I know, I know: for those who have known me for a while, this is quite a different beast (and I use the term loosely) than the Audi 90, and BMW M5 of my single days! Anyway, this led us to the hybrid version of the face-lifted Ford Fusion. I may be going soft in my daddy-of-two-middle-ages, but I can't abide ugly cars. The first version of the Fusion was for salesmen and grannies and as for the Toyota Prius..... let's just leave those to the "more liberal-than-thou" need to be seen in my suppository-shape trendy-green-car crowd! We thought the Honda Civic was going to be too small so we homed in on the Fusion. However, after crunching the numbers, it turned out that we didn't love the extra room all THAT much, so off the see the Civic hybrid.

With Mr. Opportunity knocking, we got to experience the never-fail-to-gag experience of a new car lot and the ever lovely day spent with car sale people. Let me tell ya; those guys will make you want to go out and hug a lawyer! Although we knew what to expect, it was still a little bit of a shock to the system (like jumping right into a less-than-warm pool). Remember; we keep our cars 10 years and replace them 5 years apart, so it's been a while. At Rusty Wallace we experience everything from rude behavior, to musical offices, to the "bait-and-switch". The annoying thing about all this was that we went in prepared! We knew their invoice price, we had loan % information, we knew what we wanted and didn't want, we knew that they had a week to sell the car(s) before they automatically became non-current, year-old models (we targeted '09 that they had in inventory). This is late August remember, and new car models hit in September industry-wide.

So there you are; got em' over a barrel time. It was even a rainy Monday for Pete-sakes! So, what the friendly folks at the dealership subjected us to was 3 hours of run-around that went nowhere. The worse part was that they kept using tactics like trying to get us to sign these bogus "offer-sheets" to rope you into a "Bull Stuff" deal and just repeatedly insulting our intelligence. So we walked. On the way out of the lot though, a funny thing happened, there on the Used Car side was an '08 Civic Hybrid that was $8000 less than the new version! So after lunch we went back to look at it. Amazingly, the salesman was cordial, low-pressure and easy to work with, so we worked on a deal with him that evening for 3 more hours. In the end, it didn't work out, since his sales manager was cut out of the same clothe as the one over on the new car side of the lot, but it wasn't half bad. It didn't work out, because the sale manager wanted to play hardball and was unwilling to meet us half-way (or even a quarter-way for that matter), but I'd definitely recommend that salesman to anyone.

For those of you who know my wife, you know that, that wasn't the end of it. She had Civic Hybrid on the brain now and spent several hours that night scouring the Internet for every single one between Ft. Worth and Durant, Oklahoma! My girl's a bulldog when she finds a bone to worry on! The next morning, we're off to Lewisville (an hour away) with a list of cars to look at and that's after talking to 2 other car dealerships before I leave (including the one in Oklahoma). To make a long story short, we find what I'm looking for a the first place, buy the car the next day and have a great experience with a small specialty dealer that mostly operates on the Internet.

Do I love it.... the jury's out, but it's growing on me in it's own funky way. It's put together nicely, like every other Honda I've ever owned. It's not huge with room to spare like the Fusion, but it's big enough. The gas mileage is "as advertised", we've been getting between 38 and 40 in the city and got almost 52mpg on our trip to Arkansas last weekend! That'll work!!! Hopefully, the price of gas will stay reasonable at least until we've replaced the truck in 4 more years, but if not, this car will definitely help take a little bit of the sting out of the price of gas.