March 2010

The search for wheels

A week ago, we went to braai at a friend’s place in Bellville. Drove past a used car dealership in Durban Road, they had an Opel Meriva on the lot.

Now I was all for replacing Tanya’s Astra Classic with another Astra Classic, maybe the short-arsed one with an 1800 engine, because she doesn’t get nearly enough traffic fines… yea, right. But they stopped making the G-cars in 2005, and something newer would be nice.

But the later Astra models are either huge, or resemble an overgrown Kadett. On the other hand, the Meriva looked nice. White, 2006 model, 113k on the clock, R89k.

If they wanted to actually sell the thing to us, that is.

You see, if you’re looking to drop close to a hundred thousand ront on a car, you probably have a job. Which means that you will be pitching at the dealership outside of core hours. What do you mean, you don’t do test drives after 4? Or on Saturdays? Feh.

Meanwhile Pieter found a Gumtree listing for a little more than what the fools in Durban Road wanted, for a car with 45k on the clock, as opposed to 113k. Sounded good to us, so we went to see the car on Saturday. Tanya liked it, let’s do it.

Of course, when it came to banking details time, the price was suddenly R 99 900, up R 900. I’m not one to quibble over 1%, so I told him to deliver the thing with a full tank and I’m happy.

Update: Jaco delivered the car, already transferred to Tanya’s name, with a new licence disc valid for a year — I can’t complain about the service.

Google crumbs: RMP Motors, Bellville.

Keeping Aaron happy :-)

When I started this blog, it was all about the house.

Well, things have moved on, and while the house still needs lots of attention, I’ve also started blogging about guns and cars and computers.

I figured that this is not fair to houseblogs.net readers, so I spent a little time figuring out how to exclude some posts from going there.

Turns out it’s dead simple. Changing the RSS feed to http://www.retro.co.za/blog/?feed=rss2&cat=-6,-56 excludes categories 6 and 56, being “Guns” and “Cars” (I left the “Geek” for Laura-Jane).

So if you’re running WordPress, and you don’t want the wrath of Aaron… :-)