No more shaking & XM update

I almost forgot to mention what happened when we took my car into the dealership yesterday. After dealing with the same guy the last two trips, we decided the next course of action was to make sure the wheels were balanced properly. Joe had also noticed that when we bought the new tire, the dealership mounted it with the treads going the wrong way. In other words, the part that said “this side out” was facing inward. The guy we had been dealing with said they’d balance that tire for free, and instead of charging us $75 to balance the remaining three tires, they’d only charge us $50.

When we came back to get the car, we were surprised to learn that they had balanced all four tires and there was no charge! That was a relief since we had already spent $485 between purchasing the new tire and replacing the wheel bearing. The car drives great now, and even the alignment feels better. I suspect the tread issue was causing the alignment issue.

In other car news, Joe just ordered a new antenna for the car. It broke off awhile back, but since I don’t listen to the radio much, and it not being there didn’t seem to affect the reception much, if at all, we didn’t bother replacing it. He also ordered this piece from the armrest that broke off about a year ago. It keeps the storage part of the armrest closed, so I haven’t been able to put the armrest up for a year or everything would fall out.

Finally, I just wanted to report that I am loving my XM satellite radio. You’re supposed to mount the antenna on the outside of the car, but Joe insisted on putting it inside behind the back seat. We got into a pretty good argument over it (see? we do argue!), but I concede that this time he wins. I didn’t want him to bother doing it that way since I was convinced it wouldn’t work, and for a little while, it was looking like I was right, but that was because we originally were using the option to pick up signal through a dead FM channel. Like the morons that we are, we didn’t notice that I do in fact have a cassette player in the car. So we’re using that FM channel for the first couple of days and the sound is going in and out and driving me nuts. Then I happened to look closely at my radio and laughed because there was the cassette player! I don’t know why I didn’t think I had one. Maybe because it’s so out-dated? Anyway, the signal using the cassette is much stronger and I haven’t had any reception issues since. I haven’t even used my cd player since getting the satellite radio. I keep it on channel 82 (trance) almost exclusively because it has the best music. That was totally worth the $165 spent (that includes activation, a year’s worth of service, and the equipment).