Almost Ours ...

Yesterday, Shelby and I drove down to the escrow company and signed a giant stack -- the last stack -- of house-related paperwork. Assuming there aren't any last-minute hitches (like, say, the escrow office burning to the ground last night), escrow closing happens sometime this afternoon and the house is ours!

Beforehand, everyone told us scary stories about just how many papers we'd be signing, and how our hands would be cramping up by the end, but the stack wasn't that big. It felt strange to repetitively sign my middle name, though -- since that's only something I place on the most legal of legal documents, and I ordinarily don't have many of those, it's not ingrained in my muscle memory like the rest of my signature.

After the signing, there was a scramble to find our nearest "credit union service center" and procure a cashier's check for $106,000 and change; I hadn't brought a check along with me because I'd assumed we'd be coming back today. Fortunately, withdrawing a giant sum from my bank account turned out to be completely painless -- you'd think that it would involve something more stringent than just asking for my driver's license, but apparently not.