The Brad Hole

Beth is out in Florida this week for work, and I'm left alone in the house with the 2 cats, like some kind of old spinster lady. And like an old spinster, I have no control over the cats whatsoever.

The cats have decided to celebrate my throwback to bachelor-hood. Ian peed in the corner of the bedroom last night at around 3 am (his incessant pawing woke me up). Bagheera, not wanting to be left out, yakked up a hairball in the family room this morning. Finally, Ian fell asleep in my work chair (forbidden territory!) while I was eating dinner, and in keeping with the theme, threw up most of *his* dinner. Luckily, the majority of it landed on the plastic floor protector instead of the carpet or my chair. How the cats manage to make such a mess when 50% of the floorspace available to them is tile, I'll never know.

Switching gears, our house closing is rapidly approaching - next Thursday is C-Day. The seller agreed to all our repair terms without even blinking, which was a relief. Apparently the repair costs all get subtracted from our closing cost, so that'll ease the blow quite a bit.

The volume of paperwork that I've had to give the mortgage company in the past week is shocking - some 35 pages of documentation for all kinds of oddball things. What's more, for some reason our fax machine doesn't want to talk to theirs, so I had to drive up there during lunch today, a 30-minute each-way trip to drop off the latest batch.

It's not as bad as that though: the mortgage office is within a few miles of my parents, so I paid them a visit and picked up some stuff. And by stuff I mean a box of Time Life "Home Repair" books from the 80s and more lemons than you can possibly imagine. Apparently the recent rains have caused their lemon tree to practically explode, both in quantity of lemons and overall lemon size. There were a few that, I can say without exaggeration, were nearly as round and large as grapefruit. If worse comes to worst, I might set up a lemonade stand to help finance the new house.