Yesterday was a bit of a dead loss. When I heard about the house I sallied forth online and found several thousand overpriced and increasingly degenerate houses, which depressed me so much I broke my no-frivolous-internet rule and mooped around on Mental Floss for the rest of the evening. For which I was duly punished: it was shortly before midnight that I learned of the quaint Victorian custom of propping up their newly-deceased relatives and taking family photos, a thought that made my slumber uneasy.
Today the houses are, if anything, more decrepit. I like looking at houses in theory: I just prefer it if they don’t have mustard-coloured paisley carpet and a kitchen the size of my own spleen. Did entire generations of New Zealanders live on Bovril? Or were women back then just more serene, and this better able to cope with whipping up a three-course dinner for eight on a strip of bench that was 90% sink? (By “back then”, I mean “during the era when sea-foam green was the colour of choice for kitchen cabinets”. Naturally.)
So anyway… *deep sigh* we’re going to have a look at a place in an hour with no fence, no garage and a fireplace only marginally less repulsive than our current one. Then tomorrow we’re viewing a place whose listing had only one photo, and whose agents asked if we were students and sounded so fierce I didn’t even dare ask about the kitchen, any mention of which had been tactfully omitted online. Such fun.
On the bright side, an agent for the house a few doors down from us is going to ring me back. If the house is semi-decent it would be a Good Thing: v. easy for moving, anyway.
Update: Email from Mother to myself:
Dear Smokey the Magnificent
Sorry about the bombardment of houses - Ruth sent you some and I may have
doubled up!
Mother.
Email from myself to Mother:
Heh. Yus, it is very kind but I think I have seen them all already. We went to have a look at one on Cook St but Bnonny* did not like it, and I committed a faux pas by asking if they wouldn’t mind if we painted, and it turned out they just had. But, someone’s gonna show me round 10 Fzzzfphht St** in an hour, and I peeked in the windows (it’s empty) and it looked not too bad! Wouldn’t that be handy? We wouldn’t even need a moving van, the pig could just help me carry things. But we will see… I couldn’t see the kitchen from outside. Might be infested. Or plague-ridden. Speaking of which, the pig had her first cigarette today.
Smokey the Magnificent.
*Helpdesk Man.
**Names have been changed to prevent crazed fans outbidding us and burning love-hearts into the lawn. We live at 3 Fzzzfphht St, so you see how close the new house is?
Kovac Says:
