Partying is Such Sweet Sorrow...

This will be the final regularly-scheduled identical post for the Chris Jones Group and Mortgage Blogger, as it’s become rather obvious that more than half the time I don’t write much about finance. Since Mortgage Blogger is really supposed to be about mortgages and real-estate finance, it seems a little odd that I’d post some of my more, shall we say, esoteric musings on that site. So I’ll endeavor to keep both sites going simultaneously, but as you may have noticed, even handling a single post to both sites sometimes handcuffs me.

The bond market has been absolutely fantastic the last couple days, and even the end of last week, as economic numbers continue to walk that very fine line between good but not really good. Bond rates are rising and that’s driving mortgage rates down. Good news for us. The 30-year mortgage is down at about 6% right now, and that’s going to be a strong signal for buying in the late winter/early spring if things last that long. I suspect that you’ll start to see articles about how the worst may be over for real-estate price declines; some articles are already coming out about that. And that would make this the shortest housing recession ever recorded. About two weeks long, I believe.

Plug here for our Homebuyer’s Workshop on November 9 at 7pm. If you enjoy this blog, you have no possible reason to miss the workshop, which will be, I promise you, even better. Well, okay. If you live in Virginia, you’re excused. RSVP here.

Jeanette and I wwere shopping for costumes the other day and something occurred to me. I have five standard costumes that I wear – a minuteman, a musketeer, a gangster (mostly for the suit), a pirate and Zorro. I’ve made much of the costumery myself, and only buy things when I cannot make them out of anything handy (I’ve made rapiers, for instance, as two of the above costumes require them, but the musket alas was beyond my expertise). Jeanette, by contrast, has no costume at all. By our count, she’s been showing-pregnant four times while we’ve been married, so that makes it a little harder, but really, she ought to have something standard that she can wear when she needs to. So we went to the costume shop to get her something.

Apparently, if you are a woman, you have three options: prostitute, clueless and disgusting old woman, or witch. Witch is easy, though I haven’t seen any White Witch costumes (shame, really, that was a gool getup), and traditional. Disgusting older person has been around a while, and isn’t that far from zombie, another traditional costume. But by far the most common costume is prostitute, in an incredible and almost infinite array of varieties: Wonder Woman, Cleopatra, gangster moll, Batgirl, Catwoman, French maid, candystriper, nurse, cheerleader, what have you. All of these costumes feature bodices cut so low they needn’t bother, and skirts cut so high that the crotch is visible. Seriously. In our little community, many of the pictures had the prices pasted over the crotch of the model. From the one or two that were not so tastefully covered, I could tell why the others had been treated so.

Steve Stockdale, friend of the Group, reports that mothers go with their daughters and pick out these costumes. That a daughter could wear one of these costumes with her mother’s permission boggles the mind. Certainly my daughters will not, and my wife naturally wasn’t that enamored of doing so either. What’s a girl to do? I have infinite options, it seems like. What does Jeanette have?

One of our neighbors is going as Mother Nature, a very good idea without a great deal of photographic example, so she’ll be explaining it all night, which to my mind defeats the purpose, or at least modifies it to the point that it’s annoying rather than fun. There are some costumes that make sense in the presence of the male half, for instance she could be Juliet to my Romeo, or even Queen Mother Anne to my D’Artagnan, if you like The Man in the Iron Mask (and I do), but neither of those, nor many others like them, make much sense on their own.

Suggestions?