Yesterday I bought a car that I’ve never seen from a person I’ve never met using text messaging and Twitter. I still find it amazing. Nevertheless, in a few days we’ll be a two-car family once again.

I usually go down to Salt Lake around the last Friday of the month for a couple of meetings I enjoy attending. This time both meetings were on the same day with a podcasting conference during the day. The monthly CTO Breakfast (hosted by Phil Windley) started the day at 8 a.m. The podcasting conference was interesting, put on by another friend Thom Allen. Then the day was capped off by the monthly Geek/Blogger dinner arranged by another good friend, Laura Moncur and her husband Mike. So, I drove down Thursday evening to stay at Heather’s place in North Salt Lake. I sent Heather a text message on Thursday to see if the guest bed was available. It was, she replied. I got there about 9 p.m. Ty opened the door…

“Father! I didn’t know you were coming down!”

Then he turned to Danielle who was at the computer, “Did you know grandpa was coming?”

“No,” she replied.

When I saw Heather the next morning as I was leaving for the breakfast, she told me she was sitting in the Bountiful Temple in a session when she suddenly remembered she hadn’t told anyone I was coming. I appreciate the use of the guest bedroom. Someday I need to fix the hole in the wall that’s pretty much my fault….

The breakfast and conference were held at Neumont College in South Jordan. Both were a lot of fun and I enjoyed the day. Kudos to Thom Allen for putting together a very good podcasting conference. About 9:30 a.m., my iPhone rang and it was Ty. His friend Greg was in Las Vegas at an auto auction and there was a Toyota Avalon coming up on the auction in 9 minutes. It sounded like it would be a pretty good deal. I called Nina and we agreed on a price that we’d go up to. Several text messages and tweets later, we had bought the car. It looks to be a very good deal … we bought the car at about what a dealer would have bought it for, so we saved the dealer’s markup. Greg, who does this car buying regularly, will have the car thoroughly checked out and can return it to the auction if everything isn’t in good order. If all checks out, we’ll go down to Salt Lake next week, hand over the check, and come back with the car. It was just that easy.