Two days ago Mike and I went to the escrow office and signed approximately 187,000 pieces of paper. That’s only a slight exaggeration – on some of those pages I only had to write my initials. My signature went from this:

goodsig

to this:

badsig

and my hand now looks like this:

claw hand

The claw! I rather like it. It looks ominous, like, “don’t mess with the Heather or you’ll get THE CLAW!”

Yesterday we had the walk-through, where we checked to make sure everything the home inspector flagged was fixed. My dad went with me since Mike is still suffering from Man Cold. We met the seller’s agent at the house…and we couldn’t get in. The front door was broken. We TOTALLY didn’t look shady as the three of us tried to jimmy the door open. It finally took a locksmith drilling through two doors to get into the house! At least I know it’s a hard house to break into. And, I got all the locks changed on the place already! Bonus.

After the walk-through, I went to the bank to wire money to escrow. The banker that helped me was new, and had never done a wire transfer before…which made two of us. I jokingly said, “now that I’ve wired money, I should go send a telegram,” and she looked at me and said, “What’s a telegram?” I started laughing until I realized she was not joking. So I said, “um…it’s this old-fashioned way to send messages…sort of like wiring money…I don’t know, it all sounds like magic to me.” You guys, can you imagine how much more in the crapper the US economy would be if I ran banks?

Today we have to drop off one more bit of paperwork, and then we wait. Our loan is supposed to fund on Thursday, so if it all goes according to plan we should have the keys (that I have already doubly paid for) to the house on Friday. And somehow, even though I sent an ungodly amount of money via mystical wire transfer, this still doesn’t seem real.