weekend adventures…

Final Expenses
Talk about an expensive couple of days!

car repairs – $941 (replaced radiator, radiator fan)
past-due taxes for 2005 – $409 (only $93 in penalties & fees – better than I predicted!)
Disney pass renewal – $209 (luckily, Sara helped me out with this one…)

The car really set off my money schedule because, well, who plans on spending nearly a grand on a whim like that?! It was spur of the moment, it was expensive, and a lot of people think that I got ripped off, but at least it’s done now and there’s a lot to be said for that. No AC in Florida is no fun, but a car that won’t even drive because it overheats when it’s idling is even worse!

Ring Shopping, Part Deux
For our afternoon together Saturday, Sara and I continued our ring shopping endeavors, which had pluses and minuses – the minus being that we only made it to a single store, and the plus being that she managed to find her hands-down new favorite. Good news because it was less than half the price of the ring she liked from Jared’s, bad news because the store is a really small business compared to everything else that we looked at and their “service plan” doesn’t even come close to what the others offered. Whereas with most other places, the diamond itself was covered if it fell out, and Jared’s even covered the whole ring if it happens to fall down the drain or get left behind somewhere, but this place covered just the tiny accent diamonds on the sides of the ring and that’s it. They recommended insuring it along with a homeowner’s or renter’s insurance policy, but I’d have felt more comfortable if they were able to cover it in house.

So that’s where we stand right now – Sara’s going to take the design to some other places to see if they can replicate it at a similiar cost / better service plan, although I’m still considering the option of going with the other place and looking elsewhere for service and replacement insurance. We’ll see… 🙂

My Disney Dad
And Sunday rounded out the weekend with a chilly trip over to Epcot with my Dad – to think that we’d let a whopping four weeks go by since our last visit! Blasphemy, I tell ya…

It was a good trip, despite the chilly weather, and we got around to as much stuff as we could before Dad’s legs just said, “Enough, already!” We didn’t make it on Soarin’ like we wanted to because the Fast Passes we got at noon weren’t good until 8:30pm and Dad just wasn’t going to make a 145 minute wait in the standby line without someplace to sit and rest, but we all still had a lot of fun and it was neat to take Dad back to someplace that he hasn’t been in over a decade. At one point he commented that it was nice to see that he was able to pass along the Disney bug to me, and I smiled inside, thinking of how I look forward to passing it along myself someday.

But not for a looong time, Babe! 😉

All in all a quick weekend, but good times nonetheless…