First Snowfall

It snowed fairly consistently for a good part of the day yesterday. Typically Winston LOVES playing in the snow when up at his "country houses" in MA and CT :-) but apparently, he much prefers to lie in his bed in the front window and watch it while toasty warm inside. I guess Maryland snow is not as great as New England snow. I for one enjoyed watching the snow fall from my kitchen window all day where I was working with a huge pot of Conni's Chicken Stock recipee was on my stove simmering all day. It was soo good and I have a ton left over to freeze and have the rest of the week while Brad is away.

I had to drop our SUV off at the shop yesterday morning for the 2nd time in 3 weeks. And the glorified Chevy golfcart they gave me as a rental car is not safe to be driving in the snow. Actually, I don't think I would feel safe driving it in dry weather either. We have definitely decided to sell our VW Touareg and I am mentioning it here because I promised the CEO of VW in a letter I have written him that I will continue to share with everyone how disappointed we are for paying for a luxury SUV when in fact, it is a luxury lemon. The catch 22 is that we absolutely LOVE the car.....when it's drivable and not in the shop for up to 3 weeks at a time. Yes, that's right... when it goes into the shop it's never for any less than 5 business days. It is the most comfortable car to drive and it's a tank... making it super safe. We've owned the car for 4 years now and I guess we should have known better than to buy the first production year of the Touareg. In our defense, we've always owned German cars and never had any problems with them. B has spent so much time over the past month negotiating with the sales manager at Fitzgerald to try and get parts comped. The issue is that the engineering of the car is not functional to replace things at all. I'll give one example: In order to replace one head light, they needed to break something and wanted us to pay to replace the broken thing and the 2 additional hours of labor (at $125 per hour) to put the new not broken piece in. All so we can have a headlight to drive our car at night! We were not naive when we bought both our German cars. We knew maintenace would be expensive when warranties ran out and we're fine with that, however the cost of $800 to replace a headlight is absolutely absurd. We are not talking about a Mazaratti here. By the way, we definitely DID NOT pay $800. Brad fought with our warranty company and filed a claim with VW America and did get the part comped along with the labor.

We picked "the beast" up from the shop 2 weeks ago. She was parked in the garage for 4 days and then we took her out on a Saturday. We were in the car for 5 minutes and just as we said "We really love this car, let's just keep it and maybe nothing else will go wrong", the Engine light went on and the sound on the blinkers and computer system went! If that's not a sign, then I don't know what is. So after dropping W off for some tests, we went to test drive a few other SUV's. We have been doing diligent research for the past month and have it narrowed down. We now just need to dump her at Carmax because I couldn't live with the guilt of selling it to anyone myself.