So, the other night, my car was broken into. It happened about half an hour after getting to AJ and Jenny’s place with dinner. Not so fun.

Whoever did it took one of Lauren’s sweatshirts from the UofA, some gifts a few clients gave her, and a lunch box with apples and other stuff in it. Nothing else in the car was taken and, luckily for us, it wasn’t much of a financial loss. Unluckily for the jerk that did it, he didn’t get much in his smash-and-grab.

Thankfully, we had AJ and Jenny around to help us with the obligatory call to the police (who, not to their own faults, couldn’t do much to help us since there were no fingerprints left) and the removal of the thousands of small pieces of glass from everywhere in the car. The nice thing to come from this is that my car hasn’t been this clean in a while!

Pictures to come as I get them from AJ’s camera.

AJ sent me the pictures below:

As the title of the post says, shit happens (that was a bumper sticker we saw while driving around Tucson the next day and was quite fitting for this event).

As I had observed a few years ago, gas prices tend to drop dramatically just prior to an election and will go up afterward.

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My car was side swiped this morning. Luckily it was just cosmetic damage, but it still sucks to wake up to crap like that. Unfortunately, the jerk that was in the spot next to me hasn’t showed up again, so I have no clue who it was and can’t describe the car as being more than just a very large, older, white, domestic pickup truck with lots of garbage in the bed.

Update: The suspected truck returned to it’s spot over the night. Though I couldn’t find any direct proof of paint left on it’s bumper or anything like that, it’s rear bumper is about the right height that, if they pulled out and turned right immediately, he could have easily hit me with his driver-side rear bumper area. How they didn’t realize they hit me is still very much unknown. There are some new pictures up on Flickr of the truck just for record.

According to a CNN Money article and Consumer Reports, if you drive your car (varies based on individual model, of course) for 15 years or 200K+ miles, you will save roughly $31K (between strict cost savings, inflation adjustments, interest earned on the saved money, etc…) over that period of time compared to purchasing a new car of the same type every five years.

Consumer Reports also came up with “good chance” and “bad chance” lists of cars that this would have the best opportunity to apply towards; happily the Toyota RAV4, my current car, made that list. It appeared that most of the top picks were between Honda and Toyota and the worst picks were American and European. Is anyone else not too shocked by this finding?

via [I Will Teach You To Be Rich blog]

So, I’m an idiot… I could have saved myself $300 had I not used Fix-a-Flat on my tire today. I found a screw in my tire just before picking Lauren up, so, to ensure that I get to Costco to have the needed fix made, I put the can-o-crap into my tires.

Long-story-short, Costco doesn’t fix tires that have that stuff in them because they don’t consider it safe since the fix-a-flat eats away at the rubber. So as to not be running on the spare for too long, I’m going to have to pick up a new pair of tires in the next few days to replace the pair that had one damaged. The ironic part about it is that the pair that I’m going to have to replace was the newer pair on my car.

Eh… it’s just money… or two or three guests at my wedding next year…

Lesson for the day: Fix-a-flat is the devil!!!