Walking with carbon

We have just officially increased our carbon footprint and bought a second car! To be slightly more accurate, my work has bought a car, and we are buying it off work over a 2 year period. It was getting very awkward only having our one car when I was travelling so much, and work wanted to rationalise the number of lease vehicles they had at our office. I still get reimbursed for all the travel I do for work, including airport transfers, pick-up and drop-off of equipment following training etc, and I can still use all the work carparks etc. All good from our perspective, as we have a second vehicle for our personal use too.

It's a NZ-new 2001 Nissan Bluebird Sylphy (a model that never came out in New Zealand, but is a Nissan Pulsar by another name). 1.8L automatic, fuel-injected, airbags, aircon, CD player, in dark wine red. Very classy-looking, goes like the wind, handles really nicely and turns on a dime. Very comfortable, humungous boot space, and feels really roomy in the cabin. We got it AA-appraised and it came back clean as a whistle, and it's a lot of car for what we're paying. We managed to bring the price down by over $4000 from its list price and the dealer is throwing in the registration and WOF as part of the purchase price.

What was really hilarious is that we took the Sylphy for a test-drive last weekend, and as soon as we'd buckled the rugrat into her seat in the back, she looked around and said, "Can we take this car home, Mummy?" Out of the mouths of babes....

Also had my annual performance appraisal for work and it went really well, so it has been a very good day!

Pachyderm