Our Little Loan Snafu

While sitting in church yesterday, I had an overwhelming compulsion to be done with the family finances. Over the years, Phil and I have talked about it, but I like paying the bills and seeing where the money goes.

Except I don't anymore. It's become a burden too heavy for me to bear.

So I gave it to Phil. And, hooray! Perfect timing.

I got this month's mortgage bill and noticed today that the payment due for next month was not a monthly payment, but the remainder of the loan. "Ha, ha," I thought. "Their computer issued a bill in error. I wonder how many thousands of calls they've received this week. What a bummer for them, right before Christmas."

Imagine my surprise when I called the mortgage company and found that we have an entirely different type of loan than I expected! AND, somehow, Phil and I have no "Truth in Lending" paperwork, or any paperwork that describes our loan. I'm not sure, after all the home loans and refi's we've done over the years, how we closed without seeing and filing those documents, but we did. (At least, I thought I was fastidious about keeping all paperwork together in the proper file. It is conceivable that we have missing paperwork somewhere, but, I think, unlikely.)

This isn't the end of the world. Apparently, the loan will change now, but we're waiting to hear details about this oddity in the world of banking. (We do have vague recollections of when we purchased: it's challenging to get a loan on unimproved land, and we must have taken a three-year fixed, assuming we would have a house at the end of three years, at which point we could have a "regular" loan. Enter Joe, and a year's delay; enter house not selling, and then selling for less than expected; enter a year of personal growth in a trailer, and, voila! no house in three years, and, thus, no new loan.)

Besides that little snafu, Phil has taken over the finances with vision and spreadsheet expertise. I would expect no less from an engineer. I should have given it to him years ago.

A nice vision, after the day began horribly. Waking from bad dreams in the night, I went out to milk and found that Bianca had a quarter with clumps that looked like butter.

That seems like it should be mastitis. The books say that mastitis involves a quarter that's hot, firm or hard to the touch, and painful.

Bianca's quarter feels lumpy, not swollen; normal temperature, not hot. And I prodded and massaged her udder for 15 minutes with nary a moo or a kick on her part. How painful could it be, if she reacts not at all?

The California Mastitis Test revealed high somatic cell counts; maybe mastitis level, or maybe just elevated, "concerning" level. Could it just be a plugged duct? I don't know! And it's the quarter that always gives less milk, so maybe it's been an issue for a while, and I just haven't noticed? (Oh, the guilt!)

Frustrating! She eats nothing but hay and some dried molasses while milking (which, while not a product Bianca could ever graze in nature, it is a remedy for restoring health that some books recommend). She has full access to kelp, and is not pushed at all production-wise. On paper, there is no reason she should have a problem quarter.

On the other hand, she is from warm Tennessee, so the cold weather, combined with a sudden shift to once a day milking around the same time of plunging temperatures, may have caused this issue, whatever it is.

I went out to strip her quarter four more times during the day, and she gradually threw fewer clumps. She didn't milk out much at all any of those four times (a few teaspoons at least, maybe a cup at most).

Anyway, after the first depressing milking, I went to bring today's milk to the freezer for future spraying on our fields. With the processed chickens, the frozen vegetables from our garden, and various chicken carcasses waiting to become stock, our two small chest freezers didn't have room for the meat of two pigs, too, so we thankfully turned on our industrial freezer for the first time, put the boxes of pig there along with the milk-for-the-fields (that we haven't needed to keep at a constant cold temperature, and, thus, just stored there).

I opened the door and found all the jars of raw milk frozen so solidly that they pushed off the tops of the jars an inch high, with frozen milk running down the sides and all over the bottom of the freezer.

What a way to start a Monday!

I closed the freezer and went to eat breakfast. I'll deal with it another day.