Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Ameriquest & Cake Boss


The Ameriquest Mortgage Company viral video spots are making their way around again, and they are still very funny. http://www.metacafe.com/watch/yt-cyMFhQE0RFo/funny_advertisment_ameriquest_cat_dies/.

My daughter has got me hooked on Cake Boss, the TV show on TLC. Never in a million years would I have turned on this show to check it out. I think we have it set on our DVR, but I'll have to go home and double check. It is interesting how your family affects your media habits. Plus, it provides another connection point with my daughter. Thank you Buddy: http://tlc.discovery.com/tv/cake-boss/cake-boss.html


Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Taco Johns, Cars.com and Chevy Traverse

My son and I stopped at Taco Johns this past weekend because I was craving some Oles and their Crunchy Chicken Burrito. My son likes wraps too, so he ended up ordering the same. He had never tried one before and really liked it.

Unfortunately, there is not a Taco Johns nearby, but we were in another city and found one. Their quality of food is much better than Taco Bell, in my opinion. A little more expensive, but worth it in the end.

To be transparent, our agency works with Taco Johns.

Cars.com and Chevy Traverse
Our family purchased a new car the other weekend. The Memorial Day ads pushed us to into the dealerships, even though we did not end up buying it that weekend.

We narrowed down the search quickly, due to the following criteria:

We needed a vehicle that could seat 7+ because we have two kids and need to haul around friends to sporting events. And we head up to a cabin at least once a month during the summer and a couple times in the winter.

We were trading in our van and did not want another one, and we also did not want a standard SUV mainly because of the gas mileage. Therefore, a crossover quickly became the vehicle of choice.

My wife was leaning toward a Traverse, she liked how it looked, but we had never driven one or knew of anyone that had one.

I used Google to search out other crossovers and ended up on http://www.cars.com/. They have a good comparison shopping function (which is a little hard to find and they could improve its functionality by automatically pulling a list of similar vehicles that you could select) that allowed us to look at the following 4 similar vehicles in our price range: Chevy Traverse, Buick Enclave, GMC Acadia, and Saturn Outlook.

In the end, we landed on the Traverse. We bought it from a dealer in town, the same one that we bought our van from a number of years ago. However, this did not play into our decision. Price was the primary motivation.