refi, baby!

yellowstone was last week, and it was so fun!  i went in with basically no idea what to expect, and was very pleasantly surprised.  we stayed at a camp site right next to the grand canyon of the yellowstone, so lots of tall pine trees and waterfalls and rivers in the area.  hands down our favorite area of the park.  we did a day over in geyser country - old faithful and all that - and it was neat, but not a very comfortable place to be, if that makes sense.  a) the geysers smell like sulfur, which is gross, b) watching the ground randomly jetting out steam and hot water and seeing mud "boiling" is cool until you think about why it's happening, at which point you remember that you're on top of a gigantic volcano.  there are some truly breathtaking places up there, though!  and, i saw a bear for the first time in my life!  actually, five of them.  one set of mama grizzly and her two babies just off the road, one grizzly from a really far distance, and one black bear (which allegedly had another one with it, but i only saw one at a time) on a nearish hillside.  also, lots of elk including a massive bull elk, some deer, tons of pronghorn antelope, and herds of bison.  i highly recommend a visit to yellowstone - they have great roads with amazing sights very accessible to the road, plenty of good day hiking trails with

the highlight of this week so far is that we just locked in to refinance our house!  when we closed on our house at 5.875% two years ago, we thought that was amazing and were so excited to get such a great rate.  a coworker refinanced earlier this summer and said she's saving a fair bit of money, so i started looking up rates through our current mortgage company and bankrate.com - i was slightly overwhelmed with the multitude of info, though, so we e-mailed the mortgage broker we'd used when we bought the house, and he just locked us in at 4.375%!  all in all, it should save us about $260/month since we will hopefully not have to pay mortgage insurance anymore - wow, right?!  even paying closing costs out of pocket, we should officially be saving money within the year.