Oh! Let me tell you about my shallow moment of glee from last night: Neil Gaiman told me he liked the pink streaks in my hair, and said they were very fetching.

Yay!

sj,

you likely won't need to keep track of your credit score if you know it now. unless you take out new credit lines, or have late payments, or acquire substantial new debt, your credit score will probably remain about the same in the next 12 months.

The big thing is to not acquire new debt between now and when you want to buy a house. And of course remain current on your payments.

you likely won't need to keep track of your credit score if you know it now. unless you take out new credit lines, or have late payments, or acquire substantial new debt, your credit score will probably remain about the same in the next 12 months.

I don't know it now. I was wondering if there was a way to check on it that won't lower the score in the process.

sj, you can order your credit score at any time and it won't affect it at all.

what Pix said.

[link]

this is where you can pull your free credit report from each of the 3 agencies every year. I would try to pull one from each place every 4 months as my own self-monitoring practice.

Usually when you pull one, you can pay $XX to have a credit score added.

Thanks, Pix and le nubian. I'll do that.

What the others said about adding new debt. No new debt means no changes for that. But your score could still go up, because as old negative stuff drops off the score will improve. So depending on what kind of stuff you've got out there, it really can only get better.

I was wondering about this the other day--does good old stuff also fall off? For example, I paid off my car loan about seven years ago now--will that be falling off my report? (It's a bit moot, as I now have a mortgage, but still)

I must share about a rather inglorious moment in my weight training regime.

A few weeks back, I started learning the very basics of the Olympic lifts. The first of these is the hang clean, which is the first part of the clean and jerk.

Basically, you drop into a squat with the bar held in front of you at knee level. You then drive up hard with your hips, accelerating the bar upwards parallel to the front of your body. You let it go up to a titch above shoulder height, then drop back into a squat to catch it long the front of your shoulders. It's an explosive (and fun) movement, and the bar moves up fast, fast, fast.

I've been doing quite well at the lift, only today I misjudged how close I was holding the bar to my body. The bar, which as I said above, moves parallel to the front of my body. At high speed.

Let's just say I gave the bar a lot of oomph.

Let's also say that I am, er, fairly well endowed.

Ow.

I'm making pizza with sweet potatoes, spicy sausage, and goat cheese for dinner along with lentil soup (also with some of the spicy sausage). It smells yummy, but I'm sure it is not going to be nearly as yummy as the wedding dinner we were having a year ago today here.