Lexie

At the beginning of June Justin and I got an adorable 7 week old kitten named Lexie. She's about twice the size now that she was when we got her, but she's still really cute.

It took 5 or 6 days for Emmie to settle down with a new cat in a house. We showed them to each other on the first night. Lexie didn't care, obviously, but Emmie freaked out and started hissing. We had to keep Lexie locked in a room. But we waited just long enough so that when we let Lexie out Emmie didn't hate her anymore.

Lexie and Emmie are in love. Look at Lexie gazing at Emmie adoringly:

Here's another one of the early ones where I caught them napping together:

And another time that I found Emmie completely draped over Lexie:

Lexie had her face buried in his belly too, but when I started taking pictures she looked over at me. I interrupt a lot of naps.

All Dressed Up

We were at our friends Laura and Waseem's wedding on May 30th. Unfortunately I got very few pictures at the wedding. The lighting was horrible. But I got my father-in-law to snap a picture of Justin and I before the reception.

Since we've been married we've only gotten 1 or 2 snapshots of us taken. My camera is too hard to use to just hand it over to anyone to get a picture taken. Doing that involves about 5 minutes of instruction first. So I have great pictures of everybody else... just not of us.

Matt and Lynsey

Matt and Lynsey got engaged this past December. They're getting married May 15, 2010. I have no idea how they have so much patience. Justin and I got engaged after 6 months and were married 7 or 8 months later.

I took some engagement pictures of them this past weekend. I was really happy with how most of them turned out. I can't seem to chose which ones to post, so I'll post the best of each shot.

Elijah at 2 Months

I saw my nephew Elijah today for the first time in a month. He's almost 2 1/2 months old now, and had changed a lot! Nick, Hilary, and Elijah came over on Saturday night, along with Lynsey and Matt. I didn't get any pictures of the adults, I only cared about the baby.

His little onsie said "Demolition Expert." So cute!

He recently started smiling and cooing.

On Sunday we celebrated my Pake's 80th birthday. I didn't get many pictures of Elijah, and all the good ones were when he was sleeping.

Here he is sleeping in the crib that his Daddy and all his aunts and uncles slept in when they were babies:

And here he is, all tuckered out right before going home, sleeping on Granny. His cheek was all smushed up, and he was almost giving the finger! I wish I had noticed it at the time. I would have switched it to his other finger.

I love this little guy.

Pictures

About a month ago I took some pictures of my sister Giliane and her boyfriend Bronson, as well as my brother Matthew, and his fiancee Lynsey. I wanted to put a few up here, but I have a really low bandwidth at my house. I have my USB key here at work today, and the pictures are on it. Unfortunately I've taken more recent pictures this weekend, but I don't have those on my USB key. Hopefully I'll remember that for tomorrow.

Here's Giliane and Bronson:

Now here are some of Matthew and his fiancee Lynsey:

I liked my pictures of Giliane and Bronson better. But I went out with Matt and Lynsey this past weekend and got some gorgeous engagement pictures. I'll post them soon. Along with the newest pictures of my nephew, Elijah.

Funny

My grade 2/3 class (ages 7 and 8) and I were just outside playing soccer baseball for Phys. Ed. One of my students, Daniel, who is notoriously wimpy, fell down and scraped his elbow. He started yelling, "I'm bleeding! I'm bleeding!"

Steven, who was on his team, turned to him, exasperated, and yelled back, "It doesn't matter! You're a man!"

Caution: Possible Boredom Ahead (unless you're a geek like me)

Justin and I... okay who am I kidding, I decided to turn our Jeep loan that we have with Chrysler Financial into a line of credit at our credit union. We got a $25,000 line of credit to pay off the approximately $22,500 that we had left on our Jeep loan.

Basically, my plan when going in search of a new loan for the car was a lower interest rate that would either lower our payments or pay off the Jeep faster. Prime has plummetted since we bought the Jeep in November of 2007 (or rather, since Justin bought the Jeep for $5000 more than we had agreed upon without consulting with me... yeah that was a great day).

Our interest rate with Chrysler was 7.79, and now our rate is 5.25. It's not the kind of drop that we would majorly notice because the loan is so "small" (compared to our mortgage, $22,500 is nothing). Basically by the time we paid off the Jeep we would have saved around $1000 in interest. I was not overly impressed with what I was being offered.

At first.

Then I realized that this $25,000 is always available to us. Visions of IVF fairies began dancing in my head.

I also realized that with an LOC, we can have every penny that we have at our disposal applied to the LOC, and just pay our bills when we need to. This would automatically take the money for the bills out of the LOC. What that translates to is lower interest costs, because you only pay interest per dollar per day.

When we had the loan at Chrysler Financial I wasn't comfortable paying extra or putting our savings on the loan because I knew that money wouldn't be available to us if we found that we really needed it (ie. if I found myself unemployed... which I will in 3 months). Therefore there was no way the loan was going to be paid off before the 5 year ammortization period was up. I was just too afraid of getting rid of all our savings. I was too afraid we would find ourselves in a situation where we needed that money, and it would be gone.

However, because it's a line of credit, if we find either the next day or 25 years from now that we need the money we had previously applied on the loan, it is always available to us.

Here's the clincher though: all we have to pay on the LOC each month is the interest. Since I immediately transferred our $8500 savings onto it, we're only using $14,000 (keep in mind, our savings were quite small because we have paid off about $50,000 of loans in the past 18 months - not including our mortgage or down payment). That translates to about $56 a month in interest. Once we get our $5000 in taxes back and put that on the LOC, it will be $36 a month.

I am a complete freak about debt, so I will put every penny possible on the LOC and not just take advantage of it. But I do love the fact that our necessary payment each month is so low.


I'm not going to pretend that that entertained anybody but me. If you've actually made it to this point, I apologize if I've bored you. I'm a total financial nerd. Budgetting and paying off debt really excites me.