To talk about what I did yesterday, I have to go back to Tuesday night.

Sarah came home complaining that our car was at it again, making some sort of metallic dragging/grinding noise. So we went out and just in reversing out of the space, the noise commenced. Odder still, for something that sounded a lot like a dragging tailpipe, there was nothing dragging.

That did it. Time to get a new car.

As you may remember, our current ride is a 1999 Kia Sephia, a car that's won some sort of industry award as Shittiest Car Ever Produced on the Pacific Rim. We're at the point now where we've just about put as much money into the car in repairs as it's worth. We'd been mulling a purchase, but needed the prospect of even more repairs to get us moving.

After looking at a number of different cars, we settled on the Toyota Corolla. We'd read hardly a negative word on it, and it seemed to be in our price range. Helping in that respect was Mass Buying Power, a consortium that negotiates price breaks on items for its members (businesses, schools, etc.).

So we wound up going to the Toyota dealership in Wellesley and bought a Corolla, unexpectedly getting an '04 as the '03s were gone. It was all very simple, the only real oddity being how Toyota sets up their options packages. To get the side impact air bags and ABS we had to choose from a specific subset of models, for example. And you couldn't get those and a sunroof - at least not from the factory. The dealer could put the sunroof in. Not that we were looking for one.

In any case, we did all that and were told that, for what we wanted, it could take up to 4 weeks depending how quickly cars currently in transit get out here. Turns out, though, that the dealer found a car meeting our specs in the area. So somewhere in southern New England there's a silver Corolla that we'll be driving by early next week.

Oddly enough, that dragging sound was gone when we pulled out of our space here at Babson to go to the dealer. We assume that a rock or other construction debris (there's quite a bit going on both on and near campus) got lodged in something and was making that noise. In the end, then, the thing that forced our hand with the new car probably was never a problem to begin with.

And we wound up getting $1000 on the trade in, which is more than we expected based on Blue Book values for our crate.

With that done, we had the afternoon free. It being the first real summer day of the year (temps in the low 90s, and humid), there was talk of going to a beach or other spot, but Sarah wound up taking a nap. I started looking at wedding rings and some other wedding-related jewelry, and in mentioning this to Sarah upon her rising we decided to head over to the Jeweler's Exchange in Sudbury to look at wedding rings.

(You may remember that this is the same store I got her engagement ring)

It was actually a nice afternoon for a drive, and Sudbury is a good distance - not too close that you don't get the benefits of a drive, but close enough that on a hot day you don't wind up sweating yourself out.

We went in and started looking at the plain bands. I found my ring in about 12 seconds - very basic yellow gold, millgrain bands along the sides. Sarah looked at several bands, but wound up needing something that more complimented her engagement ring. Should have seen that coming. For as bad as it could have been, though, it wound up being OK. It's not like the whole thing is covered in diamonds.

Price was OK - probably not as much of a saving as they advertise, but a little better than what I'd seen retail elsewhere.

All in all, we did our part to get the economy going Wednesday. Not that we can do anything like that again until about 2015.