passports and the car

Two accomplishments last weekend. First, we found that passports. We discovered they were missing back in February when Mike needed to copy his for employment records at his new job. I thought they were hidden in the armoir. Mike thought they were hidden in one of two other locations. They weren't in any of the three. We both remembered a conversation about where to put them. I remember not like Mike's idea and him not liking mine. So we could remember all that. However, we couldn't remember where they finally ended up after we got home from Mexico last summer. At random points we would search places in the house looking for them with no luck. This weekend I went to pull a shirt off the closet shelf that I had put there because the strap needed to be sewn back on and I thought I could do it at my grandmother's. When I pulled the shirt a travel bag fell down and the thud seemed pretty heavy for an empty bag. There were our passports! Along with other miscellaneous things from our Mexico trip. Right after we got back from Mexico we were busy with details for a friend's wedding and then out-of-town friends stayed with us that same weekend. We're guessing that even though we had the conversation about where to keep the passports that we ended up just putting the bag on the shelf in a rush to clean up without actually putting them away. Glad to have them again though. It's very difficult to flee the country on short notice without them.

The other exciting thing was that we got the clean title to the Camry. It's all paid off and now it's all ours. We're really excited to not have a car payment anymore. When we bought the car a year and half ago we had really good interest rates on our savings account and got a really low interest rate on the car loan. So it made more sense to have the loan. Then the economy changed and the rates on our CD savings went down. We decided to hurry up and get the loan paid off until Mike got news that IBM was going to lay him off. So the car loan got paid off a little later than planned. But now it's done and we're really excited to be rid of it. Yippe.