A guy here at work is getting married. I observed that he had just bought a house & wondered why they had waited until now. Apparently there's a serious income gap in the mortgage terms available to couples and singles, and we tend to fall into it here at work. They're holding the wedding after the grace period allowed by the terms of his mortgage financing. I had wondered about that one-year ban on cohabitating in my mortgage application.

But he was grousing about one of the places they were getting registered with. They assigned them a sales rep who was trying to get them to put every white elephant and overpriced geegaw in the inventory on their registry. It never occurred to me that these registry things could be opportunities for high-pressure sales offensives. After all, it isn't "your money", so it's a chance to hit a couple where they're weakest - somebody else's wallet. The end result is a lot of unnecessary fancy plate & silver utensils collecting dust in one of those display cabinets like the one my former landlord was trying to get me to buy last weekend when I wandered into his distressed-antiques furniture place & mentioned that I was setting up housekeeping, of a sort.