Slowly Slowly

That's how I feel this month has gone. And yet, at the same time it's December 17 and what exactly have I been doing or achieving? Not much. For the last few weeks I've felt like I've simply been treading water. Where will we live? What are we doing for Christmas? How about New Years? Are we still going away?

Who knows!!! Certainly not me.

But now at least one those questions has been answered.

Just to backtrack, we applied for the townhouse I mentioned previously last Monday. Three days later I got a call from the agent saying he couldn't find A's application form. I assured him we handed in both forms after sitting there and filling them out at the same time. He said he'd look around his desk. 20 minutes later he called me back and said he couldn't find it.

I asked if he could email a replacement form that we could fill in and fax back to him. He took down my email address. Over an hour later, getting close to COB, I still hadn't received his email. So I called him up, only to be told he had found A's form attached to someone else's application. Thanks for letting me know buddy!!

Time marches on. By Friday we still hadn't heard anything and I was starting to get edgy. I called him up and he said the owner still hadn't decided which applicant to accept. Fair enough. He offered to call me back before the end of the day and let me know what the status was.

Of course I didn't hear from him until Saturday afternoon. This time news was not good. There was nothing wrong with our application, but they had accepted someone else.

I was upset! Neither A or I have ever been rejected from a rental application before. I guess the market is not what it was 4 years ago though! Still life goes on.

It really put us in a pickle though, because we were so happy with this place we had stopped looking at other options. This put us back by at least a week. Not optimal with Christmas and NYE looming ever closer.

Monday I was in a bit of a funk going through the available listings on domain. Tuesday I headed down to the gong again to view a house in the same area. $60 more per week, lovely outside, not so great inside, and a much longer walk to the station for A.

After viewing this house I went to visit my brother who lives nearby. I was sitting on his sofa, brandishing my geeky "real estate spreadsheet" and bitchy about the mess we were in when I got a call from A. We had got the place!! The people they selected had fallen through and were were 2nd on the list. YAYAYAYAYAY!!!

It's not set in stone yet; we have to go down tomorrow to leave a deposit and sign the paperwork. But still, we are in a much better position than we were 3 days ago.


So I still don't know how or when we are moving, what we are doing for Christmas or NYE, or whether we will get to go away. Oh and I've only bought one Christmas present thus far. Wanna swap lives for the next few weeks?