Insomnia to the tune of an Eddie Rabbit song:

Oooooooooooooooohh I’m signing my life away, looking for a better way, for me…

Jes stayed up late worrying about money, so I am taking the morning shift. I’ve been up on and off since three. At four thirty I gave up and got up. I keep replaying our financial data in my head. We have a meeting with a bank first thing today to finalize our FHA MHDC home loan. Through this program Missouri is granting us three percent of the purchase price to cover closing costs; however, if we move in under nine years we have to pay them back a percentage of the grant. Still, that’s nearly four grand in “free” money. The loan also comes with the lowest rate anyone is offering right now. Wouldn’t you know it, we look for a year and it goes up the week we sign a contract. In the wider historical context, the rate is still quite low.

I do think we are going to love the house and home ownership. With the baby immanent, the first year is going to be tight: no cable, ditch the netflix, drive the motorbike to work, red meat on alternate weekends tight. Growing up it was always like that, my mom makes this pizza that you can’t eat more than one slice of – cheap, good and filling. My parents raised six kids on far less than I make now. I’m not so concerned about the debt, it’s the idea that the interest is front loaded so that we are paying the bank double what the property is worth over the life of the loan – that makes me a little crazy. But then I bought food on credit in college so I’ve eaten apples that I’ve ended up paying for twenty times over. I like that image – credit as forbidden (forbidding) fruit.

Then there is the nine years thing. I have reinvented myself on a regular three year schedule – though I was in the ville for nine years, so there is precedent. I was talking to my dad the other night and he was having a “face his mortality” moment. He’d had a colon cancer screening with an all clear result and the doctor told him that he didn’t have to have another test for five years. “In five years I’ll be eighty, so maybe I’ve had my last screening,” he said in the way that one jokes about their eventual exodus.

They are going to Venice in the fall to travel while they are still able, not that there is anything wrong with either of them – knock on wood. I wanted to see them more this summer than we will be able to. Houses, babies, and new jobs tend to monopolize things a bit. I told my dad that we’d probably live in this house for ten years and I could hear him wince over the phone – he was wondering whether he’d be around in ten years. His mother lived to be ninety-six, but his father died quite young.

I guess nothing will wake you up in the middle of the night quite like death and taxes. Oh, and Eddie Rabbit….