Oh, and Rod left today for Disneyland with our 52yo daughter. She bought an annual pass after her husband died. She has gone once by herself (first time alone) and her plan is to take separate trips with each family member.
Rod got home from Dland and I immediately left for Reno. My 2 72yo friends from highschool ate lots of wonderful food and hiked around a lake and climbed a mountain. I got home to the news that we close escrow on October 24th!!
Things are moving along well! The new car plus fire insurance threw a wrench in the works. Having the higher car payment (we went 3 years at 4%) and ridiculously high fire insurance due to living in the Sierra Foothills; our debt to income ratio was thrown off. The most frustrating thing is, I told the banker (she is a total ditz and keeps goofing up) the first day that we had the means to get rid of the car debt. She said not to worry about it and then said the same thing to Rod when he reminded her 2 weeks later. So we go in to sign some more paperwork and she sees the insurance bill and starts panicking. She wouldn't stop blubbering about how this wasn't going to work. I actually put my hand up like a student to get her attention. "WE CAN GET RID OF THE CAR DEBT!" After an explanation it started to dawn on her but she kept trying to tell us what to do. I couldn't get through her thick skull that my son-in-law is a banker and could have the money there tomorrow. We took the notes she gave us, stopped by a friend's house, called Troy and had the money the next day. So the loan is now provisionally approved and we have met the provisions. I've already packed bins of clothing and dishes for our first night when we go up to get the keys, hopefully on October 24th!
I think I must have told you about what happened when I bought "Millie," didn't I? I told them a substantial down payment, "balance on Net 30 terms." Apparently somebody there didn't understand what "Net 30 terms" means; they shoved a 5-year note down my throat. With a non-trivial interest rate. Had they been unwilling or unable to give me Net 30 terms, either my father, or my credit union, would have done so. The personal banker at the bank holding the note agreed with me that the dealer had screwed up, and screwed up badly. And I gave the management at the dealership a piece of my mind about it, both before and after moving Heaven and Earth to pay off the note within the first 15 days. The same dealership has on more than one occasion sent me marketing mail, wanting me to trade her in on a newer model. Including "cutesy" ones designed to look like hardcopies of internal emails. Probably a generation ago, they would have been designed to look like copies of interoffice memos. The most recent was in direct defiance of my very clear statement that I do not dispose of functioning vehicles; when I get rid of a car, it is to have it de-registered and hauled off to its final rusting place, and my demand that they cease and desist all attempts to buy "Millie" back. I replied with a very strongly worded letter, making it clear that (1) the only reason I went to them in the first place was because one of their service writers was a friend whom I'd known since he was in diapers, (2) I was more than a little bit insulted when they assumed I wanted special treatment because of that (in fact, I was giving them special treatment), and (3) in spite of that connection, I would henceforth be taking my periodic maintenance business elsewhere.
I do not remember that particular incident but it sure does sound like par for the course. We got good news yesterday. Our son finally got his VA paperwork straightened out. Turns out his X failed to forward very important information that had gone to the old address. We will be getting a break on property tax because he is 100% disabled. We are also entitled to a stipend as his caregivers; which we have become. The real estate agent called and we were able to sign off the contingencies. All the ducks are in a row and he asked us if it was okay to close early. We're like: Uh YEAH!!
I'm reminded of a Sandra Boynton cartoon, from her book, Chocolate: The Consuming Passion. It seems that a typical Boynton hippopotamus, when asked if he liked chocolate, replied OH, YES, PLEASE! (As it happens, I never touch the stuff, and haven't since I was of a single-digit age. It seems that an allergist, apparently not too skilled at pediatrics, declared that chocolate was a probable aggravating factor in my allergies. Even though I'd never shown any sign of any food allergies whatsoever. I'm convinced that it was a play to get me to tolerate a painful series of skin tests, followed by a painful and lengthy [but very lucrative] series of shots. To coin a cartoon catchphrase, "He don't know me vewwy well, do he?" For me, the path of least resistance was to cultivate a loathing for the stuff. Which wasn't terribly difficult: the number of candy bars I liked could be counted on one hand, with enough fingers left for the number of items in a typical Sees or Whitman's assortment; the strawberry flavor of Nestle's Quik had recently become available in Southern California, and it hadn't been all that long ago that I'd gotten into some completely unsweetened cooking chocolate by mistake.)
Boy did you spark a memory. Scratch tests and painful shots. Something I'm sure my parents could ill afford at the time. I actually do have seasonal allergies (which have almost disappeared since we started raising our own bees) and high reaction still to house dust. If I really need to clean; I have to take a pill. But I totally hail from a chocolate family. Especially my father and we girls followed suit. I've cut way back as I've gotten older and am indeed very picky. Mostly dark chocolate for which I make my own fillings. Trader Joe's had a dark chocolate bar that was like a Milky Way but they discontinued it.
Over a decade later, an entirely different allergist ran me through an apparently experimental testing procedure (that never did, so far as I am aware, catch on) in which the test subjects snorted tiny antigen samples. Since they had to be done one at a time, with several minutes between samples (to wait for a reaction), the tests were run on several subjects in a group. I was in a group of at least three people, and sat, quietly reading, hardly reacting to anything; there was a younger kid in the group who reacted strongly to almost everything. I consented to a single round of scratches as a follow-up for ten inconclusive results, and my reaction to the scratches themselves was several orders of magnitude stronger than to any of the antigens applied to them, with the result that the allergist quickly concluded that I was the worst possible candidate for a series of shots, and that they would be far more trouble and trauma than they could possibly be worth, and put me on 6mg Polaramine Repetabs -- timed-release chlorpheniramine, as I recall.
In high school I had to walk to the doctor every day for a week for a shot. They did not help at all.
Things went sideways today. Instead of closing early; we've been delayed until Monday because of the insurance people. We have dealt with so many incompetent people. We're getting pretty anxious. But we still have plenty to do before we're really packed for the first move. Rod and I have to be back in The Valley on Halloween for a party so our first stay will be short. I need to be up there Thursday as I have an appointment to get my "real" ID since I'll be flying in December.
