Z/Web

Some crazy stuff happened today. At least it seemed crazy at the time, though in retrospect it wasn’t as bad as I thought live. The main things I knew waking up was that I had a major deadline with my magazine — I had to get the cover art FedExed to the printers today — and I we’d scheduled a mortgage meeting in the afternoon. The former I’d worked on over the weekend, so it was no problem, but I was a little nervous and unsure of what to expect about the latter meeting.

In the morning I ran into a fascinating chicken-and-the-egg dilemma. I asked my local bank branch about opening a checking account in Oregon since that’s one of the things on my to-do list. To my surprise, they cannot open an account there for me here: I have to do that up there. That creates a problem because I need to put the money from the sale of my place here into that account… at least that would be much easier than moving money around later. I really wanted to have that account all set up with a check card so I could use it on my trip to Oregon to prep the new house for move-in. It’s also supposed to be a free account with my mortgage and I’d get payments automatically debited. But if the bank here can’t create that account, that makes things awkward. There’s a chance I can open the account online or over the phone; I’ll have to explore those two options.

The afternoon meeting proved anti-climactic. We just filled out a lot of forms for the new loan (remember, we switched loan programs last week). There was a bit of a scare earlier when I showed up at the Scotts Valley bank to meet the mortgage lady for our trip to San Jose for the meeting and she wasn’t there: I suddenly panicked and thought maybe I’d misunderstood and we were to meet at the Santa Cruz branch. I didn’t know her cell number and she didn’t know mine so I was unsure how we were going to connect. Fortunately, she was just a few minutes late and showed up and we made it to the meeting successfully. The loan process at the meeting was fairly routine, a few basic forms (I mostly signed my name) and a few questions. This is a loan only for first-time home buyers, but since I technically don’t own real estate (I pay rent for the land on my current place), I qualify. The loan guy said the bank would have all my material before we even got back to Santa Cruz, so things are moving.