We got our lease on the place in Half Moon Bay today!

I tried to get a moving quote from Stevens Van Lines, the company that moved us here from Colorado, but I haven’t heard back from them. I guess I will have to try a few more companies.

Anyone know any good movers on the peninsula in the Bay Area?

We spent today doing family things, and I must say, it was a great day!

First we all headed down to Half Moon Bay to check out two rental houses down there. We need to find a larger place, I need an office, and Natalie needs a bedroom, so we are looking for a 3br place instead of our current 2br place.

We looked at two places, one that was a 4br with 1100 sq/ft, and one that was 3br and 1700 sq/ft. The 1100 sq/ft house had nicer amenities, new appliances, bathrooms, etc, but the master bedroom was barely big enough to fit our california king bed, there’s no way it would also fit the rest of our bedroom furniture.

The second place was perfect! While the appliances aren’t updated, size wise it should work out great. We told the agent that showed it to us that we were very interested and got an application to fill out. I sent that in this evening, I had intended to do it earlier, but as I was filling it out, I realized that I didn’t have my driver’s license. I left it at Safeway yesterday, so I had to run out and get that.

We’re hoping to hear back on the rental here in a couple of days, it would be nice to lock that down so we can give our current landlord notice about when we are leaving. He’s been great, he understands why we are leaving, and has been very willing to work with us as we look for something else.

After looking at the houses, we drove around Half Moon Bay a bit, realizing it was much larger and nicer than we had originally thought. It’s about 14 miles door to door from the place we want to get, and the office, so that shouldn’t be too bad a drive every day, assuming traffic doesn’t bite me!

From there we went to the mall for pictures with the Easter Bunny. Here’s the result

Today, Natalie and I took Jacqueline to the park down the street to get outside a bit. We stuck her in the swing and let her play in the grass.

The swing just kind of exists for her, she can’t really do much except sit there and hold on! Here’s a video of some of that excitement.

The grass was much more entertaining for her, she has never experienced grass before, and she found it useful to hold on to while trying to maintain her balance.

Yesterday’s adventure to San Francisco was caught on camera! Check out the video of our drive

So here we go, this post has been a week coming, I just haven't had the time do get it together. About a month ago, perhaps a little more, I did something that seemed to upset quite a few people, even apparently some people at Nissan! I posted the opportunity to buy my Nissan Leaf on Ebay. That lasted all of a few minutes, I’m not even sure how long the auction was up 24 hours before I was asked to (or really it was suggested that I ) remove it. So down it came, along with the posts that I had put up announcing it.

What people didn’t know was that I had been posting the Leaf on craigslist here in the bay area for a month or more before it was ever listed on Ebay. I had a few inquiries from the Craigslist ad, though many of those inquiries were just your typical internet trolls complaining. Some even took the time to email me and call me an “Idiot” I appreciate that someone took the time to do that.

So back to Ebay, I pulled the ad, I removed the blog/forum posts, I cleared most of my tracks at the threat of losing the right to purchase the Leaf. I even quit posting the ad on Craigslist. After the ad came down from Ebay people started coming out of the wood work asking to buy the car. Fortunately for me I had lined someone up before I even pulled the Ebay ad down. In fact the ad didn’t even have anything to do with getting rid of my car, the Craigslist ad came through.

What? I thought you purchased the Leaf last week?

Well, technically I did, for a little while anyways. I had a guy fly in from Detroit on Monday of last week, we drove from the airport to the dealer, then the bank, then the dealer again. The dealer wouldn’t take a cashier’s check, so we had to go to the bank and have the money wired from their bank, to the dealer’s bank, which was all of 1 block away. Unfortunately the dealer’s bank became a problem and wouldn’t show the transfer as posting until the following day. So in order for us to drive the car off the lot that day I ended up having to take a loan out on the car as a fall back contract, in case the transfer didn’t go through.

After about 4 hours of things we finally left the dealer, I in my 350z and the new owner in the Nissan Leaf. I didn’t even get to drive the thing! Though I did sit in it a few times

So there it is, I no longer own a 2011 Nissan Leaf? Why might you ask? Well it really doesn’t matter what I say, people are going to hate on me. But here goes my explanation with a little backstory.

Back in April of 2010 I got an email from Nissan announcing the preorder process for the Leaf, I jumped on things and signed up, immediately preordering as soon as I could. Shortly after that I setup www.LeafOwner.com with the thought of creating a website dedicated to the Leaf. I got some good traffic, with the help of some key features on Engadget, AutoBlogGreen and even two different tweets from Lance Armstrong!

I was thrilled at the idea of getting a Leaf, I have an 8-9 mile commute, so it was going to work out perfectly for that. I was one of the first people to get the Aerovironment charger inspections, I asked my landlord if we could get an install going. From there things actually started to sour a bit. I got the charger assessment back and it was for $2200, roughly $800 for the charger/shipping, and then the rest for the installation, for about an hour’s worth of labor and maybe $100 worth of equipment.

As the summer progressed I kept up with the Leaf, attending events to see the car when I could, and then went through the ordering process, that is when things really went south for me. I went ahead and ordered the car, as a lease option, but when I started thinking about it, the lease was going to be $420 a month. I started thinking, 420 a month could go towards a very nice car payment, rather than “renting” a very expensive Nissan Versa.

I’ll take some hits for that, but to me that is what the car ultimately became. It’s an economy sized hatchback, that when fully priced out last week was $38k. While there are lots of cool geeky features in the Leaf, the only real addition above and beyond a Versa was the batteries, the electric aspect. So I decided that the car most likely wasn’t for me.

In October I went to the driving events that Nissan was doing, and that pretty much sealed the deal for me. I drove the car, and after driving corvettes, camaros, and 350zs I just couldn’t see myself driving the Leaf, not at the cost.

I’m a car guy, I always have been, and the later it got into 2010 the more I had the itch to start racing cars again. I am now actively autocrossing my 350z (www.project350z.com). Heck, for the price that the Leaf ultimately cost I could have purchased a brand new 2010 Nismo 370z! Though I didn’t want to do that either, spending more money just wasn’t in the cars right now. My 350z cost me $12k, and that’s a lot smaller car payment than a new Leaf would be, and the car ultimately becomes more useful to me as I can autocross it.

So in the end, to sum things up. The price of the electric car killed it for me. I’m not saying I will never own another Leaf, or an electric car, but right now it just didn’t make sense to me. In the future I do hope to own an electric car, heck maybe I’ll build an electric VB Bug for www.projectvw.com in the future. But for now, I’ll let the early adopters help to bring the price of the electric car down.

For those of you who choose to hate me for that, I am sorry that you feel that way, but that’s the beauty of our wonderful country, everyone gets to have their own opinion.

(if you’re interested in purchasing LeafOwner.com let me know!)

Keep them doggies rolling, is that how it goes? That’s how we go. We’re in Carlin Nevada tonight, on our way to California hoping to find a truck full of our stuff there on Friday.

Today we went through Wyoming, Utah and some of Nevada. We had sun, rain, wind, fog, sand storms, salt storms, and even got attacked by thousands of tumble weeds. But we made it. Hotel here lost power for a bit due to wind. Here’s a shot of the salt flats today, I’ve got more (near whiteout conditions) on the camera that I will upload when we get to California.

That’s all for tonight, gotta sleep and do some work in the morning before we hopefully complete the rest of the drive to San Carlos.

Today was our first ultrasound, we got the see our baby's heartbeat for the first time. HOLY CRIKEY this just got really real, in a good way. Natalie was brought to tears, I realized this as my cue to get up from my chair and hold her hand!

Based on the ultrasound we are now told our due date is 10/1/2010, not near as cool as 10/10/10, but it will have to do! My buddy Jim will be pulling for us to delay a day and go 10/2/10 in honor of his birthday. Dude will be 34 by then, crikey he’s old :)

So we are getting more and more excited about the coming baby. In the doctor’s office today I picked up a flyer for a cord-blood bank, something I had never heard of before this morning. I read through the flyer and the basic gist is they will take your baby’s umbilical cord blood and cryogenically store it for an amount of time in case you need it. They say the stem cells in cord blood can be used to cure all sorts of diseases. I thought this sounded like a cool idea, and figured I would check out the pricing: basically it was $150 for the kit to collect and ship the blood back to the cord-blood bank.

Then you paid something like $1800 for 18 years of storage, or $96/mo, or $65/mo for a two year term. Kind of pricey I thought. So I thought about that, and figured I would do some research over the coming months to see if this is something we wanted to do. Well, low and behold I loaded up MSN.com this evening (putting off packing for the trip to California) and saw a headline talking about cord-blood banks! Off to read it I went.

Take a read yourself, the basic gist of the article, and the feedback from the various doctors and medical societies mentioned in the article is that private cord-blood banks are pretty much a waste of money. So now I have it in my head that we don’t use a cord-blood bank, but we’ve got another 7 months or so to decide, we’ll see what happens in that time frame and what other research says.

Now I’m off to work on packing more, we’ve got a long road trip starting in the morning.

It’s been a year since I was last in Cali, and I’m heading back! What’s the big deal? Well I half consider California home, even more so than Missouri even though I lived in MO for 14 years. I spent 6-9 grades, and 11-12 in California, in both Southern and Northern California. I got married in California, my brother lives in California, and quite a few of my friends do as well. So any chance I get to go back I look forward to.

This time around I’m heading out to the Bay area for a few days of DotNetNuke Training with a client, I’ll be there later tonight training Tues thru Thursday, and then flying home on Saturday. I’m going to visit with some friends from high school Friday night at a little dinner get together I’ve arranged. I’m also hoping to check out the DotNetNuke offices in San Mateo on Friday while I’m there.

I’ve yet to decide what camera(s) I’m taking with me, I’d like to take both DSLrs but I don’t want to carry them both. If I had a flash attachment for the 5D Mark II I would leave the old Rebel at home, but I currently don’t, so I need the Rebel if I want to shoot any flash shots of the gathering Friday night, though I guess I could just use the point and shoot for that.

It looks like 2010 is going to be another busy travel year, I am headed to Rhode Island next week for 2 days of DNN consulting out there as well.

Stay tuned for some pictures of my Cali travels later this week.