goodbye, Sir Ed

Silly me, i did know when i posted yesterday that the wonderful Sir Ed had died. Not quite sure where that information went when i was writing. I hadn't previously known that much about him, but when we were on holliday, the Mt Egmont/Taranaki information centre (the one up the mountain) told me that he used to climb that mountain all the time. And i've learnt more about him over the past 36 hours, obviously, with all the obits flying around. What an amazing, humble person. How fantastic would it be to achieve either just the mountain climbing or just the humanitarian work that he managed, in one lifetime. Goodness.

I really wanted to try and post a photo with every entry, but i went to take today's and realised that i had just insisted tim take my camera with him to the stock cars. Gutted.

Today was great fun. Not. Oh my god the amount of mess we saw. How is it that some people managed to live in total and utter tips? I saw two bedrooms where the floor was not known to exist. I saw a kitchen that had piles of breakfast and dinner remnants plus the dirty dishes used to make them(it was 3.30pm). I saw socks lying in hallways, didn't even go close to looking at one bathroom that i doubt would have been cleaned in the past year. The most incredible thing was that the worst flats were ones being shown by tenancy agencies. I felt embarrassed for them, some of the places were so disgusting. 

Out of the six or so places we trooped round to today, we filled in one application form. And oh, how i want that flat. It is perfect. Well, i lie. the bathroom could be a little nicer, but everything else about it is wonderful. It felt so nice and homey. Unfortunately the old flat hunt game is starting to resemble more and more what it was like for us in Melbourne - competing with a mass of other people for the few good and reasonably priced flats. So you have to be chatty for as long as possible with the decision maker so that they remember your face when it comes to the crunch. How on earth would a person decide who is going to look after a house the best from the questions asked on an application form, really? There is essentially nothing to differentiate, except for maybe handwriting. 

My fingers and toes are crossed. But we do still have a couple of weeks to find somewhere and we are lucky enough to have a back up in case we lose out on all fronts. The bonus of the back up is that we can be fussy...but the longer we wait to find somewhere, the harder it will be to find flatties.

Crap how did it get to be twenty past 8? Time for more work of the crafty kind while the boy is out being a bogan. Woop woop.