 Joy and Cheerfulness |
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It's always a good weekend when old friends are in town. I also saw Team America: World Police, and I have to say that I think those guys set the bar so high with South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut that any subsequent feature film of theirs will always fall short in my eyes. Sad but true. I mean, it was clever in some parts and I laughed a few times, but it didn't really do it for me. My little brother and his friends loved it, though. After expending most of my energy this weekend trying not to gobble my friend's baby whole, I'm trying to get my head on straight for the week ahead. I've sent an email to a local mentoring program my sister participated in before she moved. I figure it will be good for my soul to spend a few hours a month with a kid who needs some positive adult interaction. I am sure we won't be going to the park and staging protests over discontinued root beer popsicles and stealing the Swan Boats, but it could still be fun. There's the option of doing it for a semester or doing it for a year. My sister, who did the semester program, swears that signing up for the year program would be much more fulfilling and fantastic because you can drive your kid around and do stuff with her solo rather than just meeting her at the group activities, but since I am such a nervous nelly, immediately I think, what if we get in a car wreck and she is hurled out of my sunroof? Would I be legally responsible for the kid's welfare? Would I get sued? What if she chokes on her Sonic milkshake? What if she gets kidnapped from the McDonald's bathroom? What if she falls down the stairs in the basketball arena? I mean, leave it to me to think of the worst case scenario. I guess these are reasonable questions to ask. Who knows? I'm also setting up an appointment to talk about refinancing with my mortgage woman, Betty. I found out that my FHA loan, because it originated before a certain date, requires me to pay PMI for the life of the loan, which, excuse me, is not exactly appealing. So I've been emailing back and forth with Betty and trying to figure out if it's worth it for me to refinance. I learned so much about it earlier this year (and got amazing advice and information from my readers) but I was overwhelmed and decided to drop it. But now, especially after finding out about my perma-PMI, I'm thinking about it again. I measure "worth it" by basically how long it will take me, after closing costs, to break even, and I don't want it to be years and years and years because that is just stupid. Being able to drop PMI immediately upon refinancing by getting a higher appraisal is a big part of what would help me to break even faster because of the savings of dropping the PMI, so I had my realtor do a cost market analysis, and she revealed that the average cost of homes comparable to mine that have sold in my area over the past few months is $64,000 more than what mine appraised for upon purchase three and a half years ago. Which means, hell yeah, I'd be dropping the PMI right away, since that's $43,000 more than mine would need to reappraise for in order to do that. Are you following me? Probably not, but that's okay. Betty said that they can probably waive the reappraisal and just use the cost market analysis average cost provided by my realtor, which, I mean, wow. If they can't use that, and a reappraisal has to be done, and my house does not end up appraising for high enough to drop the PMI, I probably won't do it. But, if they can, I'd be switching to a conventional loan, getting a 1.375% rate drop, dropping my PMI, saving more than $100 a month on my mortgage note, and breaking even in fewer than two years. So I'm thinking I will probably do it. We'll see. I am sure you are thrilled to hear that I will keep you posted. On the pet front, it looks like the magic pill killed Daisy's mysterious fleas, and I guess I will be going back to the vet to buy my flea preventative instead of buying it online from Australia, because I just refuse to believe that Revolution that functioned properly would not have killed the fleas. It will cost me a buttload more, but those are the breaks. Erin, who wrote to sing me the line from "Sandy" about the fleas, probably does not know that I once saved a little Chihuahua mix whom I called Sandy (because I'd been waiting my whole life to find a dog to call Sandy) and to whom I sang that song every day until a guy from work adopted Sandy about a week later. Sandy had a bad leg and smelled funny but was really sweet. I placed a found ad in the paper and a few people came by, and it was so sad to see the hopes of grown men be so dashed when they saw that Sandy wasn't their lost dog. Sandy was one of the few dogs Daisy ever got along with, probably because Daisy was bigger. Oh, Sandy, we hardly knew ye. 
::: And now, the baby. This baby and I have now met three times, once when she was five weeks old, once when she was four months old, and once when she was ten months old, which was this weekend. She has grown so astronomically that it blows my mind. I need her to move back here so we can drool on each other on a regular basis. I mean, watching her giggle and grow is just kind of the definition of happiness. It even says so right there on her t-shirt. 
About this time in ...
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