Refinancing Completed and about last night...

Hurray, our refinancing on our loan finally completed after the sale of our previous house in April. I remember I called our bank the day before the closing on the sale when I knew we would receive the large check and that was on April 8. So it has taken exactly eight weeks since I applied on the phone for the loan to be approved and funded. But is was worth it to lock into a low fixed rate (4.910%) on a loan that is less than 35% of the LTV of our house, giving us a tiny monthly payment less than a fifth of our monthly income. The closing company called yesterday to say the loan would be funded today, paying off the balance of our interest only loan we held since last year when we bought our current home. I checked our lender's site today and the rates are up to 5.5% now. One thing I noticed after receiving our last loan is we must have received 20 or 30 of these "official" looking letters telling us to buy life insurance policies to cover our mortgage for some low, low monthly fee. To how many of these shady places did our lender sell our mailing address?

And yesterday's storm was another episode of mother nature versus mid-county and Ameren UE. I think mother nature won again, and Ameren UE lost as usual. We had tickets to see Rent last night at the Fox, and we were wondering the best way to get from mid-County to the theater with the traffic snarled at rush hour with downed trees and dead stoplights. At around 5pm, the signals were out at McKnight and I-64, McCutcheon Road was closed, and Brentwood Blvd was a parking lot (although I know the lights were working at Brentwood and Wrenwood.) Here on campus we only had a few power blips, but it sounds like U. City, Clayton and Ladue were hammered pretty hard. Our own neighborhood looked like a branch battleground with small limbs down everywhere and some bigger ones down here and there. But at least we had power for which we were quite thankful. Surprisingly, getting to the Fox was not bad until things slowed down as we approached Big Bend and then Skinker on Forest Park Parkway. On the way back everything was fine and the stop lights were working at McKnight/64 again.