Dec
22
pre-holiday commutes
Filed Under holidays, traffic, work | Leave a Comment
This weekend is a holiday weekend. That means today was rush hour
literally all day long. It happens the day prior to every holiday. Add a bit of rain for good measure, and you’re guaranteed a wretched commute home, (ir)regardless of how early you leave work.
Today’s trip home: 1 hour and 50 minutes … for 35 miles. Not at all that bad. (A little Hot Tracks lingo there. Any MI people still watch the show?)
So who are all these people, and shouldn’t they be on vacation some where?
Dec
18
Surely there’s still some hope …
Hmmm. According to my calendar, there’s only one week left for the weather to get its act together. There’s no way Santa’s going to be able to land here if this keeps up.
Dec
16
Being an occasional Dave Ramsey listener, I frequently hear that phrase from callers on his program. I’ve longed for the day when Rachel and I could celebrate such a milestone.
Well, as of today we’re debt free … if only for a short time. We closed on our Michigan house today which means we no longer have a mortgage. Ahhh, what a great feeling. It also means we no longer have a house.
Because we weren’t in Michigan for the closing, the title company sent us all 
the documents overnight, with nicely colored arrow stickers pointing out the places on each page we needed to sign. Several of the pages required a notary. It was nice that we didn’t have to go to a title company to sign everything, but because we had to get these documents signed and back in the mail the same day, we had to find a notary that was open on a Saturday. We ended up at our local Pak Mail store, of all places. That’s right– we closed on our house at Pak Mail. They charged $3 for every page requiring a notary stamp, so thankfully there were only a few. Pictured is Rachel signing some of the pages while waiting in line. (Incidentally, we were waiting behind numerous folks desperately trying to ship boxes of gifts to friends and family. After hearing what they had to pay, even for the “no guarantees on the timing” packages, the beauty of online shopping was reinforced.)
So we’ll try to enjoy being debt free during the holidays this year, for come sometime around January 16 we’ll have a new mortgage to pay. Yep, we made an offer on a house Thursday morning, and it was accepted with no counter that evening. Woo-hoo! More details about that as things progress. It’s been a busy week. Now we need to set a new target date for when we can once again say “we’re debt free” … this time hopefully while still owning a house. 