Dining is always a pleasure with cramps

I got to work quite late... stayed up a rather long time dealing with Avery and his stuff, and keeping alert for any untoward events. When I got up, I noted that he apparently had made a little progress in getting his shit moved around, though it's a little hard to tell if it's just relocation of existing stuff, or new stuff being moved out. In any case, I am applying the screws a little bit... I've turned off the power to the barn.

A friend of mine thinks I secretly like being the hard-ass. She can't feel how knotted-up my stomach is lately. Nothing like stomach cramps to make dining a pleasure these days.

I've finally gotten off my ass about refinancing the house one last time before interest rates bounce up. The rate I'd get isn't much lower than what I have now, but it allows me the chance to roll my home equity line into the principal, deduct a shitload of interest next year, and get a newer update on what the place is worth. My main motivation is the head-up-ass style of the people at First Tennessee... they have my home equity line and are part of the same company as my mortgage holder. They're a royal pain in the ass to deal with, and the capper for me is that years after every other merchant and vendor in the known world has the ability to accept my payment online, directly from my own checking account, First Tennessee... doesn't. It's the last paper check I write, and has been for a couple of years (since my trash hauler put up a website where I can pay online). Every time I ask them when they're going to get their asses in gear, they are "studying it."

Well, I told them, your buddies over in the mortgage department seem to have it pretty much working, so why not just do it the way they did it FOUR YEARS AGO?

So, fuck'em. I'll keep my mortgage with First Horizon, but told my mortgage guy I never wanted to hear from the home equity people over there again. So, I'm supposed to close on the refinance next month. Not taking any cash out, though the house is probably worth double what I owe on it right now and I could use the money to have the bathroom completely done and update the kitchen... I'll save my pennies and next year's tax refund for that.

In a semi-related topic, does anyone actually "save pennies?" I mean, my late grandfather was so driven by money that he would pick up every penny he saw on the street when walking his dog in Chicago, and bring it home and fill jars and piggy banks with them. They had an apartment on 39th Place on the South Side years ago, and in the kitchen there was this enormous glass piggy bank on the floor... it had so many coins in it it could not be lifted, and I wonder now how it never just fell through the floors all the way to the basement. It was really, really large and when full, had to have weighed three or four hundred pounds.

It had to have moved eventually, because he moved. Some poor mover is retired somewhere in Chicago with a hernia because of my grandfather's obsession with money!