Boy

I hope you all had a good Christmas. I know I did, it was nice to have four days off work after a manic couple of weeks. Sucked to have to come back yesterday. It’s still stupidly busy cos of the long weekend coming up, but still.

We finally got the house sorted. The ‘sort it or we pull out’ threat worked a treat. A bit annoying at how utterly pointless it all turned out to be. Turns out the couple moved out a while ago and the council have been in and removed the stairlift and bits and pieces. So what has our solicitor been banging on about for the last 4 weeks, about how we couldn’t exchange and complete until they’d sorted this out. Solicitors are crap and I certainly won’t be recommending this lot to anyone. I mean, who writes to sort out a sale, isn’t that the type of thing phones and emails were invented for? We still have the small matter of a non-existant estate agent to deal with but we did get the seller’s phone number last night and made an appointment for Saturday to go and measure up and see what state the council has left the place in. Should be fun. I’m expecting massive holes in the wall along the stairs at the very least.

The point is, we will be in by my birthday now, which is what we wanted. Not sure how much work we’ll be able to do to the decor to begin with. We had hoped to have around £1200 to spend after getting our deposit back and the money from Halifax but we’ve decided to save the money on Duncan’s south african credit card for emergency purposes – mainly that his stepdad has been diagnosed with prostate cancer and Duncan may need to fly back at some point, although hopefully not any time soon. Why do families wait until Christmas day to tell you news like this? The best part was that Duncan’s mum announced this over the phone and then couldn’t/wouldn’t talk about the treatment he was getting or anything because ‘he was in the room and didn’t want anyone talking about it’. Rodney is of the school of thought – don’t talk about it, then it can’t be real or if you do talk about it, you could make it worse.

Apart from that, we had a lovely quiet Christmas. Duncan got me an mp3 player (just a little one), renewed my REM fan club subscription and got me a gorgeous REM long-sleeved top, and got me the latest Buffy book. I bought him the 5 books he wanted in the Deathgate cycle as well as a Robert Rankin book, Spaced series 2 dvd and a Soccer AM t-shirt. We got monopoly (the latest now and then edition) as well as some dvds from people and some money to use for the house. Niall showed his soft side by getting me 3 moonstones which are to aid fertility and to help in the subsequent pregnancy. Niall likes to pretend he’s not got a soft side, but he has. I was very touched.

We’ve got a quiet New Year planned, spending the evening with friends at their house. Niall is planning on bringing fireworks but we’ll see. I probably won’t be on again, so I wish you all a peaceful, happy new year and I hope 2006 brings you everything you wish for.

Until there is a next time…

xx