Friday, February 25, 2011

My house has been sold, but ...


My house has officially been sold, as of this morning. I didn't get as much as I'd hoped for but it seemed that we were only going to get one offer although there were about six interested parties.

The problem now is that Multiplex/Hawiian has moved the goalposts and settlement for the apartment is now set for the end of May; no reason given, just the bald statement. The Realtor has negotiated a 90-day settlement for the house, which takes us to 26th May but there is nothing to stop the goalposts being moved again. The settlement documents are to be posted to us in the near future so I suppose that will fix a date and I will be more easily able to plan my move.

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Shouting from the rooftops ...

I HAVE WRITTEN PERMISSION TO KEEP TWO CATS IN MY NEW APARTMENT!!!!

So now I am trying to organise to get a pair of Bombay kittens. The difficulty is that settlement is in April but there are thirty days in April and that is a long time for a kitten so I might have to settle for a pair of teenagers. There is a pair of boys aged about 15 weeks at the moment and a pigeon pair aged six weeks. What I really need, if I want young kittens is to wait for the next litter to be born ... if there is going to be a next litter.

I have phoned and left a message to talk to the breeders so that I can get some sort of idea about what is and will be available and at the same time let them know why I am vacillating at the moment.

The new part of the shopping centre opened yesterday so the apartments can't be too far behind. Hopefully someone will have bought my house by then. There are about five or six couples circling but no-one wants to be the first to make an offer. Fingers crossed - tomorrow is a full moon in my financial sector according to one astrological prediction and I am choosing to believe it. Perhaps I should braid my hair just in case ...

Thursday, February 10, 2011

More on the house, the apartment and the cats - sorry ...

I have been reading up on the by-laws for the Apartments and I can have two cats if I have written permission from the “Council”. As there is no council yet I can’t do that but the Strata Manager will be on the council and our Multiplex Rep suggested that I should email him and send her a carbon copy to speed things up. Unfortunately he is on holidays until 21st of this month so I will have to contain myself in patience and probably miss out on the two little boys who seem to be available.

The MR has finally come clean with an address for the apartments so I’ll have cards printed and a stamp made at some stage soon.

Since the web page for the house went online there have been 1199 hits (to 9/2/2011) which the realtor says is almost unprecedented; there were 33 enquiries and there are six interested parties although none has fronted up with a price to start the bidding. The house will be open for inspection again on Saturday (today is Thursday).

The computer lounge at COTA started up again this week and I had two very nice clients, both wanting word processing help although the second one, as soon as we started was able to remember all that she has learnt before. Unfortunately she has a new computer which she bought some months ago but hasn’t used, and no-one told her that she would need to charge the battery for 16 hours first up so it wouldn’t fire up at all; not even a flicker. Mine refused to load (I spent most of the afternoon restoring and error checking it and it seems to be working fine now) but that left us with the COTA computer and I was trying to explain about the sort of information one could get from the internet when her eyes lighted up and she asked me if I could find out about a large number of skeletons on St Helena from a body dump by slavers in the 19th century. We found a news article about it and she went off happy to see if she could get it printed at the library with the help of the key search words I used and the name of the article. Naturally, the COTA printer is not connected to the computer I use …

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

The house is in Selling Mode


*****We have finally moved into the proper selling mode. We have had the pre-previews and the previews and in two days we will be having the first "Home Open".
*****In the mean time I spend my time keeping everything looking Inspection Ready which means wiping up every stray crumb and every splash of water on the sink, vacuuming the pool on a regular basis and keeping the potplants and hanging baskets looking flowery and looked after.
*****I have found that the house stays much cleaner now that I don't have any cats but I am moving more and more towards getting a cat when I move into the apartment. I would like to get two so that they have companionship but we are only supposed to have one animal and since I will be home most of the time anyway a companion animal (dreadful phrase) is not likely to get lonely except/unless I have to board it for a while.
*****With my painful hip I thought that my travelling days were over but D3 suggested trying fish oil and I must say that after two days things are feeling much better. I am not holding my breath at this stage and I keep expecting things to hurt so I am tending to still favouring the right leg.
*****I have an appointment with the physio tomorrow and I'll see if he can loosen my neck a bit more. It has been much better since it was forcibly manipulated when I fell and hit my head but it still hurts and that annoys me. Since I have waited for a couple of months for this appointment I decided that I'd keep it, not cancel, and since I will be having lunch with my Lotto group across the road from his rooms almost straight afterwards it all works out very well.
*****The sign above says "Endless Summer" and that is the way it feels from here. The rest of Australia is having cataclysmic floods and now a huge cyclone in Queensland while we are having drought and heatwave conditions.