Mission Mortgage: Accomplished

M and I had an appointment with a mortgage broker tonight, and we are now the proud owners of our very own debt (assuming that all goes well with the house.) I spent a good part of yesterday doing research on mortgages and learning just enough to hopefully cover some of the most onerous bases. I was also quite pleased with myself for my assertiveness in the meeting, as I, as the possessor of all research done, interrupted with several awkward questions that normally I am not one to want to deal with. I am so, so glad that I did my homework, though, because being able to see that his rate was at least comparable to other rates offered was a major relief. Also, I got half-offered a job editing the loan paperwork of this particular mortgage company because I pointed out, in a most annoying fashion, several typographical errors at various stages in the process. Ha! I think we were a little more troublesome than his average customer, especially since I suspect our loan was quite simple for him. No, we were just troublesome because we are troublesome kinds of people, asking a lot of questions and also, making jokes at each other. A particular favorite of mine was a form we were asked to sign as a result of the Patriot Act, informing us that in the course of doing business with this particular mortgage broker company, they may ask for such information as our name and address. (There were a few more things on the list but none of it was actually something I would not expect a lender to want to know about us.) I don't know about you, but I think they may have asked for names and addresses before they were forced to make you sign paperwork agreeing with it. To be perfectly frank, this particular mortgage broker actually knew our names BEFORE we signed paperwork. I know! Weird!

Speaking of.. nothing, except that most every other time I have heard the words "patriot act" I have then heard of some new atrocity, I just need to take this opportunity to tell you that if I see one more sticker saying "Support President Bush and Our Troops" then I will surely puke. It's like saying "Support The Fight Against Terrorism and the NRA." What bothers me about it is not the message, although you probably know by now what I think about it. What bothers me is that it's linguistic emotional blackmail. It's ugly, and it's targeted at an audience that the originator thinks is too stupid to know better that to differentiate, so if they can lump two dissimilar items into one, they will have transferred those feelings onto the other. It's an insult to the intelligence of everyday Americans... the ones who can separate politics from supporting the troops. Completely separate things. If you feel both things, that's worthy of two stickers, don't you think?

(This message brought to you by the Daily-K-Will-Probably-Stick-Her-Foot-In-Her-Mouth-Again program. You may remember the post about those awful sequined purses, whereby I was quite hateful about their very existence. I don't think I told the follow-up to that story, though. Three days later, D (queen_b980) stops by my desk to talk about something, and I said something about Court Days and she mentioned that she had read my post about the purses. I just laughed and said that they were so, so horrible.. and that's when I caught the gleam in her eye. "You've got one, don't you?" I asked with a sigh, and she grinned evilly and nodded. To prove her point, she brought one of the travesties of fashion with her into my vehicle last week and left sequins there to freak me out later, thinking there was a bug on my seat. She is tricksy, that one!)

Anyway, not the point. You know, when I was looking at ljArchive yesterday, I had to laugh at the Word-Count Analyzer. My most-used word? By a margin? "Anyway", of course. (Well, ignoring common words, at least.) I have always overused that word, even back in my letter-writing days. Am I the only one that doesn't long for the days when people wrote letters? Give me email any day. Too bad that the people I used to write letters to are people I can't really email. I guess that means I should still be a letter-writer, huh?

Back to the loan officer we met with this evening. He had a sign in his office that went something like this: "Fisherman's Creed. Early to bed, early to rise, spend all day making up lies." Am I the only person who found it humorous that a guy in his profession would advertise his propensity for lying? Even as a joke? I guess it just doesn't take much to amuse me.

M gets in these spells now and then where he thinks he needs to buy shirts. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I submit to you that I spent twenty minutes this afternoon hanging up clothes. Among those clothes were nineteen of his shirts, plus two sweaters. (Yes, yes, I know, sweaters should be folded.) He still had shirts that were already hanging.. at least three/four additional white dress shirts and a shocking array of Hawaiian print shirts, which is the M uniform during the seasons in which he doesn't look like an idiot wearing summery shirts. I think he can stop buying shirts. Really. I do.

And speaking of shirts, I got dressed in real clothes while M was on his way home from work to pick me up for our mortgage event. I had no idea what he was wearing, but.. we were totally wearing matching outfits. You might be able to get away with that kind of thing, people assuming that it's an accident, if it's a blue shirt, or a white shirt, or something like that. The shirts in question were both the same shade of burnt orange. M refused to go anywhere in matching clothing, accidental or not, so we didn't actually arrive at the mortgage office like that, but still. I guess it was an orange sort of day.

Now I am off to obsessively check my bank balance and fret about mortgages. No, I'm kidding. I'm actually surprisingly unstressed about the house thing. I am more stressed about the fact that we're going to have to MOVE in the next month. Oh! That was something new! Loan officer said that he was going to try to close by the end of the month. THIS MONTH. (Depends on the seller, too, of course.) On one hand, time is moving at a crawl but on the other, I can't believe how fast this is all happening! I just realized that we saw this house for the first time exactly one week ago. A week! And now we've bought it! It's crazy. And exciting. I can't wait until we get to move in!