excerpts from an email to my par­ents tonight:

We are wrap­ping up the insur­ance and mort­gage paper­work. We are annoyed with the bank that the day they processed the paper­work the inter­est rate went from 5.125 to 5.25%. The loan man­ager sug­gested it might go down again if we waited a few days, but then it went up to 5.38%. They think rates are start­ing to rise again. So we didn't get the low rate because of a paper­work delay. grr… It only mat­ters over the 30-year course of the loan, but we don't plan to take that long to pay if off.

We went to Home Depot tonight and picked out col­ors to repaint Rachel's office (the room next to mas­ter bed­room), the mas­ter bed­room, and hall­way. We are going to do some dec­o­ra­tive paint­ing tech­niques in that office and the mas­ter bed­room. Rachel picked 6 col­ors to do blocks of col­ors on her walls. We are doing an 'antique leather' tex­ture tech­nique for part of the mas­ter bed­room. We have some pretty cool col­ors picked out. We are pretty excited about it. We also have some ideas for the liv­ing room, but they are pretty ambi­tious and will come after we see how the upstairs goes.

Rachel is head­ing out of town tomor­row for an overnight trip to St. Louis, so she will be stop­ping by the new house. Hope­fully Ahmed will be ready for us to decide on the gloss of the fin­ish and she can decide that, and also drop off a few more things.

ps — We have labelled the houses Alpha and Beta, using ani­mal heirar­chy terms not soft­ware release terms. So Alpha house is the new, big­ger, bet­ter one. Beta is the cur­rent place in Lawrence.