The Good, the Better, and the UGLY

Our diver, Dave from Annapolis Diving Contractors,  showed us a sample of what he scraped off our hull.  

The Good:

We got what first sounded like a junk-mail call yesterday, but it turned out to be a representative from Wells Fargo offering to refinance our existing mortgages with them to a lower rate ... without appraisals. We had tried to sell the townhouse earlier this spring; it had gotten lots of showings but no offers. For the townhouse,  the refi would turn it from a negative to a positive cash flow.  A couple hundred more dollars in our pockets each month?  Yeah, I can do that.  For the Arizona house, the refi means we pay $12 more per month, and pay it off 4 years sooner.  Yeah, I can do that too.

Crazy story about having to get the paperwork printed out, signed, and faxed back in before the rates went up next morning, and having had an eye doctor's appointment so my eyes were dilated and I couldn't read said paperwork.  By the time late that evening that I could read, when we tried to print it out, we discovered that our printer was kaput, and it was too late to go to Best Buy to replace the printer or Kinko's to pay to print the stuff out.  Luckily, with the help of friend Phil, who has an office here in Annapolis, and a race with the evening's scary big thunderstorms, everything finally was printed, signed and faxed in on time.  (And sure enough, rates went up by almost 1/2 a percentage point today!)

The Better:

So, when is it good when someone says he doesn't want to see you any more?

When the someone is your cancer doctor!

That's what Dan's oncologist told him this morning! He's graduated! No need for further cancer monitoring. Of course, he does need to see his regular doc and neurologist every year, but being "medically boring" from a cancer perspective is news worth celebrating! I previously wrote about this two years ago, when we celebrated "Alive for Five!"

We considered going out for a nice dinner to rejoice in the news, but decided instead to donate the money to cancer research.  (Anyway, we had just gone out yesterday and my waistline didn't need another high-calorie meal.)

The UGLY:

According to our diver Dave, this has been a record year for fuzz growing on hulls here in Back Creek.  Our wonderful copper bottom paint made this removal easy, but look at this stuff!  He estimated that he removed 600 pounds of it.  That'll slow us down.  (Squeamish alert: there are little maggoty-looking worms that live in this stuff.  When Dave made them homeless by cleaning the hull, some of them swarmed onto him.  Eeeeeuw!) I'm really really glad Dave likes his job and is good at it, because although I love diving, I just don't think you could pay me enough to go into this water.

All in all, a very delightful and productive day!