The Elusive Yes...

The problem with taking people's advice is that they are limited to their own personal experience when they give it. I mean, THEY think it's good advice because based on their limited life experience, it appears to them to be the best thing you should do. But someone else's life experience might lead them to advise me differently. Then what should I do? For example, I was told to move into this amazing fixer-upper home in a fantastic part of town. I was told that the house would be worth sooooo much more than we were paying that we could borrow against the equity to fix up the house. I said, "Our income doesn't support that high a payment." I was told, "That doesn't matter because they base it on the house's value, not your income." Two problems with that sentence -- both of them pronouns. "They" means the mortgage companies, those illustrious folks who just got their hands slapped for handing out too much money to people like us whose income didn't support their loans and who are now defaulting on said loans. "It" is more elusive to define. They base "it" on the house's value -- that must mean the loan, right? Or maybe they base your "qualifying" for the loan on the home's new value? Either way, the elusive "they" have based the elusive "it" on our elusive income, (Can someone please hear me say I told you so?), and we still don't have our loan. Our fixer-upper is not finished. But I think we may be!

So say a prayer for those crazy Hoyts who always leap before they look. This time the "Uh-oh!" may just do us in. Funny how my mind works. When I wrote "do us in," this vision of Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady trying to make small talk about her auntie who was "done in" by someone flew into my head. Much more pleasant to think of Audrey Hepburn at a time like this. 

Yours -- for richer or for poorer,

Holly Go Lightly

(alias -- or alien or judging by how I feel today, maybe I'm that girl Sigourney Weaver found in the cave whose body was being used as an incubator by those many-tendriled creatures from outer space and who, when she finally was found by Sigourney Weaver could only manage to whisper, "kill me!" -- Megan Elizabeth)