There’s something here I don’t understand.

It has been reported recently that the hunt for WMDs in Iraq hasn’t turned up any nukes, but it has turned up a number of chemical weapons. However, it has also been reported that these chemical weapons are too weathered to be usable, or something along the lines of the weapons being too harmless to be considered WMDs.

Here in the United States, there is a large cache of chemical weapons not too far away from my home in Lexington, Ky., that have been awaiting destruction for a large number of years. They haven’t been destroyed because every time a method of disposal is proposed, residents of the surrounding communities make a massive stink over the potential threats posed to them by the destruction process.

Why don't we just dispose our our chemical weapons in the same fashion that Iraq's weapons have been deemed useless? Their weapons have been rendered inert without any organized program to get rid of them, or any reported threats to Iraqis, which would save the U.S. taxpayers many millions of dollars, and it would finally get rid of stockpiles of weapons that we have no use for. 

Good news from the house-hunting front, so far.

We found a house, a split level, 3-bedroom, 1.5 bath in a good area of town. It took us all of about 45 minutes of negotiating to settle on a price, which was almost $5000 less than the sale price, and $13000 less than the original asking price.

We're currently waiting on the appraisal to satisfy the bank, and the inspections will be done Wednesday.

For anyone that actually reads this, I apologize for not having made any entries in a while.

I've been otherwise occupied as my wife Michelle and I have been house hunting for our first home. As neither of us has much idea about the process, we've been getting a crash course from friends and parents and realtors and loan officers. It is occasionally a headache.

But we aren't making irrational decisions. We've figured out how much we can spend without stretching the household budget too thin to account for unplanned/emergency expenses. We're learning how to use the local Property Valuation Assessor's website to decide how overpriced some of these houses are for their neighborhoods, and we're praying that God lead us to the house He has intended for us.

But the mortgage process is purely a work of Satan. You'd think that the interest rate you get charged would be sufficient for the bank to get its money, but no, they've got plans to bleed you for thousands of dollars more in other fees. For the sake of comparison, I wonder how it would work if you got your loan on the black market, or just somebody with cash on hand that was satisfied collecting the interest associated with such a loan, with the deed as collateral.

Anyway, we're taking the next week off from work to really hunt for a house. Hopefully, I'll have good news by then.