Oh yeah, Iraq

Backalong, we refinanced our mortgage to get rid of the bullshit adjustable rate the bank stuck us with because we actually needed the money we were borrowing. The reasoning is that if you haven't proven the ability to pay back, they should have the right to jack your rate to make your payments higher. This is in case you couldn't hack the lower one. Are you following this?

And what does it have to do with Iraq? I'll tell you.

While making the sound financial decision to lock in a low, fixed interest rate once we had established ourselves as good, dutiful debtors with our local lending institution, we also decided to tack on a few thousand so we could add a little doohickey to the living room to make it more livable. As built it had turned out rather long and narrow. We got an estimate, but could not start the work right away.

While we waited to start our project, President George Bush started his. When we talked to our contractor sometime after the occupation of Iraq began, he said material prices had spiked and supplies were down because mass quantities of plywood were being sent over for the rebuilding.

Okay, we take one for the team. We ended up pissing that money down the health insurance rathole, because we couldn't keep up with the annual jump in premiums from our insufficient cash flow. C'est la vie.

Watching C-Span one day, I tuned in during a hearing at which whistle blowers testified about contractor abuses in Iraq. One man reported that massive quantities of plywood and other building materials arrived over there and sat around in piles until the order came to burn them because the construction was going to be done with steel instead.

Okay, these are Democrats, no doubt relishing the opportunity to grind their ax against the Republican administration, but where there's smoke, there could be burning plywood. It was mildly amusing to have this bit of cross reference, a sort of closure, viewed from an odd angle to the television in my living room because we never got to bump out that wall.