6-19-17  Landlord school and car shopping:

The main reason why we came back at this time was because Florissant now has a rule that if you're renting a house out, you must attend a class on being a landlord.  They also raised the annual landlord fee from $15 to $50.  So when we were back in St. Louis for our tax papers we checked on when we could do the class.  Turned out is was full up until June 19th, so we signed up for it.  We pretty much dreaded the class---8 hours long.  But it actully turned out to be really interesting and very informative.  They even provided Old Town Doughnuts for breakfast and Firehouse Subs for lunch.

 one of the 2 policemen running the show.

 We even got certificates to say we are schooled in identifying drugs in case we have to evict our tenant and need to show we know our drugs! 

 Neat mural on the wall inside the City Hall, where the class was.

 The 8 hours went by pretty quickly.  Then we rushed over to Bommarito Ford to look at new cars.  We had debated on whether or not to get another one, but the Taurus has over 130,000 miles and just had about $2,400 work done on it.  We drove the Escape back since it needed to be relicensed.  We knew it wouldn't pass inspection as it was---it developed a miss in the engine about a month ago and the check engine line keeps coming back on after being reset for the last 10 months of so.  Then there's the truck on the driveway that has some sort of fluid leak rendering it undrivable.   So we shopped on line and found a few Escapes and Edges that we wanted to look at.  After sitting in both, we decided the Edge was a lot more comfortable.

   At twice the cost, it should be!  Hard to see here, but total before discounts is about $41,000!  After discounts, we ended up getting it for about $33,000.

 Big selling point for me was the red color exterior and the tan and black interior.  Ken liked the V-6 engine and overall size.  So we bought it. 

After spending about 4 hours there to purchase the car, we left without it.  We got the premium coverage package which included sealants on the seats and outside.  We didn't have time to wait for that to be done, so made arrangements to come back tomorrow morning to get it.
Then we took off to Schneiderjans and headed off to dinner with them.  We went to Ferguson Brewery.  Don't know why we didn't go there more often when we lived there, it really is good.  Maybe because of all the unrest in Ferguson at the time.  At least things are going better there now---although I can't believe Ferguson actually had to pay out $1,500,000 to Michael Brown's mom and dad after he robbed a local shop and attacked a policeman before the policeman fired and killed him.  I hear the mother signed rights over to a filming company to make a movie out of it.  Also heard that an illegal alien in California was just awarded over $190,000 for the police turning him over to the Department of Homeland Security---and he is an illegal alien!  But I digress!!!