Erieversible

Can you drown in paperwork?  Or do you simply get crushed?  Either way, there’s far too much of it.

Having signed everything to do with the house contract in triplicate and everything to do with the mortgage 5 times (so far), this evening it was my turn to finalize the home insurance.  Yes, more paperwork.  What was puzzling was that most of my signatures went on pieces of paper to say that I wasn’t buying something!  It is, apparently, all to do with the way things are regulated.  Well, a little less regulation on selling insurance and a bit more on bank loans would have been better, as it happens.

Anyway, that’s the last piece of the loan puzzle.  Tomorrow it is back to ‘chase the attorney’.  I may have all afternoon and evening to do that if the weather does its worst here, with lots of snow forecast.  Always on a Friday, it seems

Today I paid the invoice for shipping the personal affects we are keeping.  They are now officially on their way to Erie.  Okay, they are still in the warehouse and will be for a week or two but the process is rolling.  Definitely no going back for those items now.  It turns out that transatlantic shipping isn’t too expensive - compared to the marine insurance.  Of the total bill one third of the cost was the insurance, which is optional, but when you are shipping all the stuff that turns a house into a home it would be terrible to lose it all with no recompense.

Not much further progress at the Isle of Man end today as it was a TT race day and the roads were closed for much of the day, restricting travel somewhat.  An early run to the tip cleared out more rubbish from the house, and arrangements have been made to sell the second car.  Even though it was only small progress today, I’m now one day closer to being able to travel to Erie.

Meanwhile the credit card company is quite happy with me living anywhere in the world, as long as the address on the account is a UK address.  That isn’t an option, so our main UK credit card will have to close.  And that’s another nuisance - why doesn’t credit history, or credit rating, work on a global basis?  I currently work for a bank (RBS) that likes to remind everybody all the time that it is a “global” bank, yet moving within that global environment is full of disconnections as far as the financial world is concerned.  In the UK we call that ’spin’.