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After work, I went car-shopping again. This time, I went to check out the Mazda3, after Godwin and Spaceinthewho both recommended it - and boy, I was floored. This car was pretty much what I was looking for! This thing felt much better than the Civic, plus the price range was pretty close to what I wanted! (~$16K instead of the ridiculous $19K Honda wants). I asked for the Mazda3 i Sports (the very base) with A/C + ALB/SRS, which Kelley Blue Book lists around $15.5K invoice. I started the negotiations at $15.5K, and they came back with $16.5. I said $16K, then they said $16.5K. The negotiations stalled out there, so I left.

Today was probably the first time I ran into such harsh resistance from salespeople - I've generally been pretty passive about pricing so far (I didn't even bother negotiating for the Civic after how crappy it drove, and it's hard to negotiate over e-mail/phone), so this was the first effort I really took at standing my ground.

What really irked me was the way I was bum-rushed as I tried to leave the first time. The manager came over and blocked the door and shook my hand, all while dragging me back to the table. When he saw I wasn't really budging from $16K out the door, he started giving me these dirty looks. I honestly started feeling guilty that I wasn't accepting his "profit-less $16.5K offer".

Anyways, I checked on CarsDirect.com and saw that the estimated price was $15,889 (or something like that), so I'll get a few more quotes from the other Mazda dealerships in this area (NeerajS said that the Mazda dealership I went to quotes a bit high [his parents bought a Mazda recently]).

I'll be heading out to San Diego this weekend (Friday - Tuesday) for apartment hunting and a meeting with some of the MT crew - it'll be good to see them again. I haven't seen those guys since OSCON ...

Man, I didn't know moving was so much work. Between trying to set my budget when I move to San Diego, consolidating my servers to cut back on costs (the new EV1Servers is ready to go - I spent some time hardening the server, and I moved the Listfoo/Swarmf databases to it), looking up auto insurance quotes (esurance, All State, and Geico each quoted me $125/month, CHRIST!), dealing with moving companies, looking for apartments, trying to buy a car, and then dealing with work stuff... things have been getting incredibly busy.

Oddly enough, I'm not feeling anything towards the whole SD thing. I'm not excited, I'm not scared, I'm not stressed (although my recent dreams might indicate otherwise) ... I just don't think the reality of it's sunk in yet. I'm sure once I start slowing down a bit, I'll realize that I'm no longer in CH ... and maybe I'll start feeling sad (or something like that) ... but right now I don't feel any different.

Phew, ok. I gotta wrap up some MT-work stuff (today was generally unproductive cause I kept getting calls and I had a LOT of errands to run) and get a few hours of shut-eye before another day begins tomorrow...