I am unfortunately in the market for a new car. I say that because the one I am driving now is going to cost too much to get back on the road. It broke down on me a few days ago and I got the estimate from the shop this morning. They weren’t exactly sure what was wrong with it at first so it took longer than usual. Turns out it is the transmission and if you know anything about fixing vehicles you know that is one of the more expensive ones. I was hoping to drive it for at least another year but that isn’t going to happen now. I always like to plan ahead for when I buy one so I can have a nice sized down payment for it but I’ll have to finance the whole thing now.

Right now I have a rental car that is thankfully covered by my insurance. I have two weeks of coverage for free so I have about a week and a half to find something. I ideally would like more time than that but it isn’t too bad. I’m just glad I don’t have to go out today or tomorrow because at least  now I can sort of take my time. The key will be not letting on to the dealerships about my situation. They try to take advantage of you any chance you get or at least that is my experience so I don’t want to give them any ammo to use. I’ll just tell them I have no trade-in and that will be the end of it.

As far as what I’m looking for reliability tops that list. I am not one of these guys like my friend Tony that is in love with their car. He drives a nice BMW but the amount of money he pays for it and constantly puts into it on upgrades is staggering. I would rather drive a regular old Honda Civic or something along those lines. I’ll be looking primarily for a Honda, Hyundai, and Kia to start. I know they are good and reliable and like I said that is my main priority when it comes to what I drive. The only other requirement is it has to be an automatic. I never learned how to drive a stick shift and don’t plan on learning now. The nice thing is this has never been an issue where I wanted one but had to refuse it because it wasn’t an automatic.

It was a little over a year ago that I got my first real nice camera for myself. It is a Nikon D5000 which if you don’t know is one of their DSLR models. I had the kit lens for the longest time but in recent months I have purchased a zoom and macro lens to accompany it. What started as a hobby has turned into me spending almost every free minute that I have taking photographs. I am not going to lie I was pretty bad in the beginning. I was only used to point and shoot cameras and the adjustment period I went through was long. While I do have automatic settings that I can use I refused to do it and did everything on manual mode. It took a lot and I mean a lot of trial and error before I was taking good shots consistently. I really would like to try to make some money off of photography but I don’t have a niche yet. I have shown my pictures to a lot of different people and everyone last one of them likes what they see so I do know I have some talent.

Anyways that is the major thing going on in my life right now. When I am not taking pictures I am editing them which is what I was doing before I started to write this. When I am done with this I want to do some research on online storage for some of my better ones. I am going to start by checking out a review zipcloud as I have heard good things about them. I think my friend Adam uses them but I could be wrong. I haven’t seen him in a couple of weeks but last time I talked to him I think that is what he said.

What I would really like to do is eventually get one of my works published somewhere. I wouldn’t even care if I didn’t get paid for it. It would just be so neat to see my name credited somewhere. My other friend Jason told me I should start going to the local horse track and getting shots of the horses running. I don’t know about that but it would be something different. I told him next time he goes to give me a heads up and I might tag along with him.