A p r i l 27

At the risk of getting anyone's hopes up (including my own), we're progressing along with our little house hunt, and of course now the viewings will begin. We've been inquiring into several places, most with the heartbreak of no response, having been rented, or having been rented to one person such that the house is therefore ruined because they're willing to divide the lease up by rooms. After all, no one wants to share a four bedroom house with some stranger. In any case, we just made an appointment that sounds very encouraging indeed, and I thought I'd let you in on it.

Surprisingly enough, it's on Flora in my sister's old neighborhood. Although I can't quite recall specifically where it is in relation to her old apartment there, it is apparently located somewhere between Percy and Bay. The house we're looking at is, amazingly, a five bedroom with a back yard, parking, three stories, two bathrooms, and hardwood floors. All for the low low price of $975 plus utilities, which works out to $244 per person even if we keep one bedroom vacant. It would either become an office or be used to hopefully accomodate our friend Mary, but this is only the dream. Mary is the greatest genius I know (you can read his site at: http://mh.ph.nu), but is solitary and shy, living mostly in his parents basement. His father is apparently being laid off in January thanks to the Met Life buyout, so at that point his father will be taking a new job in Texas. Mary does not want to go to Texas. Mary is tall and thin and weird. He would not be.. "Texas material". More to the point, a lot of Texans would be eagerly awaiting his arrival at the airport with torches and pitchforks... so he's expressed the interest of staying in Ottawa and maybe living with us, on the condition that I call him and ask him because I'm a bastard and never, ever call.
I'm sure utilities wouldn't be too terribly high each month. Leastwise no higher than they are now. Even if utilities were for some odd reason $100 for each of us every month I would only be paying about $20 more than I am now, and I'd have a kitchen and a bathroom and maybe even a closet (H'Tog has made my dreams smaller and more reasonable).

The fact that it's so reasonably priced makes me wonder what's wrong with it, but not wonder so much that I'd refuse the chance to see it. The guy has gotten a number of calls about it, but most of the people calling were students looking for a September occupancy and he was excited to know that we were actually thinking June first. So I'm all excited now, as is Broken. We scheduled the appointment for Wednesday night, which is great but for the fact that I'm super worried that someone will snatch it out of our hands before then. I mean, maybe it's rat-infested, but we want to make that determination ourselves. Right down to "Well... let's go count and see exactly how many rats we're talking about."

Basically, if we see it, we like it, and it has as much room as he claims it does, there's not going to be any hemming and hawing or any other such goings on. It will be quick, surgically efficient, and satisfying -- oh yes. Closure will be had. It would really be nice to have all the details worked out a month before we even had to move. What we really want are large bedrooms. Not opulent, but of a nice comfy size that can be made safe and personal and decidedly non-claustrophobic. Essentially we don't want five closets. We want the rooms to have closets, but we do not want the rooms to themselves be the closets. And with any luck there won't be too much of a size difference between them because there would be non-constructive conflicts over the largest one. Anyway, we'll see. We might even move the appointment to a closer date for peace of mind. We didn't want tomorrow because of my exam, but it's at 2 in the afternoon and he can't ever see us before 6:30, so no worries. Maybe even tonight. We're overly excited, like children. But you'd just have to live here for a week the way it is now and you'd be as anxious.

Some persons anonymous actually washed macaroni down the bathroom sink last week (too lazy to use the kitchen sink downstairs which is always one toweringly overfilled basin full of dishes because, of course, everyone else is too lazy to use it as well), and it's been clogged ever since. The person who did it won't own up to to the crime (no one ever does), and the clog defies unblocking. I'm going to go buy a bottle of Liquid Plumber because, while it may not bother everyone else to be unable to wash their hands, I really like being able to do it. Damn goths. I can't wait to be free of them. Free!

Of course, we're taking a goth or two with us, but it isn't goths specifically that are causing me such problems. It's just that these goths are, and consequently I feel fully entitled to a nice bitter anti-goth stance for just long enough for some good catharsis.

A p r i l 28

Sadly, I have an exam today, so I'm preoccupied with studying. I'll let you know how it goes.

A p r i l 29

It looks like we might take that house after all. Broken and I went over to see it tonight, and I must say we were definitely enchanted (Broken more than me but she is the more open minded of the two of us... when it comes to decor I'm something of a snob). In some ways it's really quite beautiful, and in others it needs a little paint, and in any case you can definitely tell that it's been the ancestral home of generations of Carleton students ("studenty" would be the word. "Filthy" would be the other. Savages. We had to imagine how it would have looked without the beer bottles and porno magazines on the floor). It was decorated rather spartanly, and the occupants, who weren't home, thus seemed to be all males. However, there was a definite attempt at some point, presumably from the previous year's tenants, to make it attractive and cozy, so I'm guessing it was home for a gaggle of artsy girls for at least a year. One of the walls along (I think) the staircase to the third floor is absolutely covered in glow star stickers. The wall itself is asking for a nice dark coat of paint (the landlord/property manager guy/whatever is open-minded to the idea of it being painted to our satisfaction... he'll even supply the paint on top of whatever painting and such are accomplished by him before we move in) but maybe I'll save the stickers. Or buy new ones and redo it.

The main floor is absolutely beautiful, almost without exception. And of course the exception is the main foyer at the front door, which has a piece of wall which is covered with raver graffiti, but the landlord insists the tenants are going to be painting it over before they move out. And he showed us the paint, brushes, and pan he was forcing them to use, so we believed him. But wow. The living room is huge and has hardwood floors hidden beneath some nasty orange carpeting that the present tenants apparently had lain down. We'll just roll it up and throw it out. But the living room itself was painted a great colour of dark blue, and the open-concept adjoining dining room was every bit as big, and painted a dusty rose. It had a shaggy blue carpet that we might keep because it's cleaner than the orange one and reminds us of Cookie Monster.

The kitchen is exceedingly big and has plenty of counter/shelf space, although I don't think much of the oven or the fridge (the oven is 60's olive green, and the fridge is more of a seventies 'beef gravy brown'. Broken and I wanted to get shiny silver letters and rename our new fridge the "Coolerator," but this fridge doesn't really deserve the honour. Perhaps we could paint it.) but it's a definite step up from the H'Tog kitchen which I have refused to in any way use all this time. It desperately needs more light (kitchens should be airy, clean and bright) but that can be arranged.

Someone got very creative with paint over the course of their occupancy. Most of it's pretty tasteful. In one of the rooms someone prettied up the trim with a sponge and green paint.. and just created nice blotchy patterns along the trim. The savages living there now have left something of a legacy, tragically, so one or two walls need minor fixing, and they tore the wallpaper off another. The property manager guy promised it would all be fixed. We'll definitely insist, and in writing.

The basement is finished and painted violet. There's a full bathroom down there and it's obviously meant to be a bedroom -- one of the best in the house. I figure we'll let our friend Kincaid have it because he was hurting for a basement bedroom and we can charge him extra for essentially having a whole bathroom to himself. Which means the insanely cheap rent can only get cheaper for the rest of us, and there are still many cool rooms to be had.

The second floor has three bedrooms. One is a closet and we're not even thinking of using it for that purpose. It's pretty but you wouldn't want to live in it. One of the current tenants was (we felt really sneaky poking through people's bedrooms but at least we didn't sleep in their beds or anything), but that's just foolishness. We'll probably combine it with the second bedroom on that floor, which is much larger but still only medium sized, and give it to Pixiegirl so that she can have a bedroom and a studio. The second floor has another bathroom with a free standing bathtub (a dream of ours) in between the shoebox bedroom and the medium one. On the far right of the second floor is the third bedroom, which is immense. It's bigger than my current room, has closets, and opens up to a cute little balcony. Broken has expressed interests in this room because she has the biggest bed in the world and she'd need space to accomodate it.

The third floor has two other bedrooms. One is roughly the size of the medium sized bedroom on the second floor, and we'll probably save it for a guest bedroom. The final bedroom is another giant. It's painted dark green, and Broken protested that it had the most hideous colour of orange on the walls as well, but I failed to notice it and am enchanted. It has a cool little "reading nook" type area with a window and a recessed section that goes into the wall where you could probably fit a desk. If there are no objections I think I'll lay claim to it because I can pay a little more for the privilege.

Anyway, we've gone and booked another appointment for tonight and shall take Kincaid and Pixiegirl to see it. If they like it, we'll snatch it up on the spot. We could probably find something a little more central (this is somewhat removed from the Bank Street core... one of the few perks of H'Tog is that you can literally step out onto the street and be in the heart of downtown... at the same time, the new place is in a more residential part of downtown and is quieter and safer and no one has found any dead whores in dumpsters anywhere near the new place in recent memory) but it has a lot of potential and in spite of my continued hemming and hawing I really think the place will be beautiful once we get our hands on it. Indeed, but for some cleaning and maybe a few minor additions (like a new faceplate for one of the lightswitches on the main floor) it's really quite pretty. And it has a little backyard where we can contemplate a garden, and a big huge planter box out front where flowers will be had this summer, and sidewalk space for chalk drawings and poetry. It's about half a block from my sister's old house, back when they were living in Ottawa two years ago.

It must be said that I'm extremely irksome today, however, due to the fact that it was brought to our attention by the property manager that he was showing the house to someone else before we got there. Now, I don't know how likely it is that we'll be beat to the punch by a bunch of scraggly students, but it is, you'll have to admit, at least theoretically possible that we'll show up only to find that our dream house has been usurped by pretenders. Grr. Of course, if Kincaid and Pixiegirl don't like house one bit, we'll happily go off looking somewhere else, but I think it's fair, and I hope you agree with me, to want to have the ability to accept or decline it -- to have the choice, versus sour defeat and bitter disappointment at the hands of people who couldn't possibly take care of our home properly. It all smacks of last year, when I was hunting for a house. Everytime I found something I could truly love, with roommates I probably wouldn't hate, it was snatched neatly away as if it were an immaculate white table cloth whisked smoothly from underneath a table setting with crystal vases filled with water and roses by someone you want dead because he can do lame magic tricks and you can't.

If I had thugs, I'd set them to "kill."

A p r i l 30

I can't begin to describe the awful disappointment one feels when the opportunities presented to you are snatched away. In particular I'm thinking of last summer, when I was stressing through house hunting, and the bloody frustrations of getting my heart set on apartment after apartment, only to find out that someone else has managed to rent it away just a day later. And everytime it happened it became clearer and clearer how little time I had left before I needed to move, and how few places there really were for me to be found. Just a little over a day ago we were pretty sure about this new house, and while it can't yet be filed under "moot" exactly, I'm feeling somewhat defeated nevertheless. We found out yesterday that just before we were to bring Kincaid and Pixiegirl along with us to see the place, the property manager-type fellow was bringing someone else to view the house. This was discouraging for the reason that we knew anyone with a little brain could see what a choice place the house was, and they might well beat us to it.

As it turns out, Broken got to see it happen. She and I had ventured out to Big Bud's which is this giant discount store in Bank Street. It's kind of like a dollar store, in that there's a wide variety of almost anything you could possibly want at super discount prices, but by no means is everything as cheap as what you'd find in an honest-to-goodness dollar store. Still, it has lots of goodies, and not all of them are tasteless. I mean, I'd never buy shoes or clothes or my ticket to high society in Big Bud's, but you can buy millions of candles of all description for a song (and a bad song, even), and they have more wrought iron candleholders than I've ever seen. You could fill a house with sconces for a fraction of the price of just buying a gothic castle from one of those posh stores like the Glebe Emporium or Pier 1. Afterwards, we sat down at the Oak for a nibble and a beverage, and it was there we ran into Charlotte. Or rather, she ran into us. In fact, she walked by, saw us, and walked in. Sometimes accuracy disrupts the flow of a story more than simple expressions and cliches. Anyway, since Broken wasn't in the mood to double back home to meet up with our friends, I took Charlotte with me back to H'Tog, and Broken decided to meet us at the house.

Charlotte is considering the purchase of a third ferret at this point, oddly enough. Her only concern is that the third might not get along with one or both or her present pets, in which case the personality conflict would ruin the whole thing. So I offered a modest proposal, which was simply this: if Charlotte buys a new ferret, and it doesn't try to eat or usurp or sodomize either Molly of Chachi, then great. However, if there were a problem, I would happily buy the new ferret from her once we were settled in a place. So she'd have kind of an assurance of a happy ending. In particular, there are these great ferrets at the pet store (just two or three blocks away) we've all been adoring lately, and because they've been around a few months, the owner wants to give them a good home, so he's lowered the prices to $134.00, and is further on the verge of bringing them all the way down to $100.00 each. It's practically causing Charlotte to itch. I know what I would do if I was already resettled and had a paycheck or two under my belt.

Meanwhile, Broken had made it to the new place just in time to see the property manager/fixit guy show a woman around. She wasn't that interested in the house, ultimately, which was surprising and cool, but for the fact that tragedy was at hand. A great many students have expressed interest in the place, but most of them want it for September when they return to classes from Toronto or whatever goddamn city they happen to consider home. An enterprising group of them drove by in someone's mother's Saturn just to see if anyone was about, though, and they got out to talk to Broken. She was just about to mention that they needed an appointment to see the place when the property manager returned, so they insinuated themselves into a viewing. While Broken sat on the front steps, some of their friends remained outside and spent the entire time talking about what they were going to do with the place when they got their pimply little hands on it. They were all first year students in residence looking to stretch their wings in the biggest cheapest house they could find, and they let it be known that although none of them would be in Ottawa for the summer, it would work out because if they got the house, they'd just sublet it to someone else until September so that it would be assuredly theirs and they could go back to mom's and dad's houses and not put another thought into it. We were just arriving when the group collected itself and left, all excited and chattering and looking decidedly like too-cool ravers. They'd grabbed some application forms for the lease, piled back into mom's car, and shot away, pledging to have the forms back the next afternoon.

I'm feeling a little venomous at this point. We showed Charlotte, Pixiegirl and Kincaid around, and everyone liked the place immensely, in spite of a few misgivings here and there (not so immediately close to Bank street, needs paint, etc.). We all agreed it was far more beautiful than where we were at present, and that the few cons were overwhelmed by the many pros. So we grabbed application forms of our own and spirited ourselves away. And I admit that I'm entirely too anxious about all this, and that I should just be relaxing. I dropped our forms off this morning (the property manager told me to just leave it in the mailbox... he'd drop by and pick it up later today), and thanks to a snarky comment made by Broken, loitered a bit just to see if the other students were going to drive by and throw out our application. I almost considered it myself, if we'd gotten there first. Still, I'm not that dishonest. I don't mind losing fair and square (well, that's only kind of true. Everyone hates to lose, for any reason. Nevertheless, I'm not so obsessed with winning that I'd overturn my own deeply ingrained sense of ethics and guilt), so long as the winners are good about climbing over me. If they did anything sneaky, well, may they die horribly in a car accident or something. We'll just see how well put together those Saturns really are. If not, well, I hope they make good use of the house.

Still, there's something not quite right about the way they went about it. At least because I'm feeling weasly and territorial. They didn't have an appointment to see the place. They just showed up and made us wait while they looked around. They don't even have any intention of living there this summer. They just want claim to it, even though it means finding different people to live there and pay the rent for them so that no one else can live there... even people who would love it and happily call it home for the next year. It reminds me of the way people behave when there's one last cupcake sitting before four or five lusting sweet tooths. The alpha personality people just mush it with their finger or spit on it or something.... anything just so long as they get to have that last cupcake and no one else even wants to go near it. It's like cheating. Now, ultimately whoever gets the place will likely be arbitrarily appointed as the result of a credit check and whatever else property concerns do to ensure desirable tenants. And with that in mind, not getting the house will be a little less of a bitter pill, simply for the fact that we're not denied for getting there second, or because there's a conspiracy afoot, or anything untoward like that.

You never know. We might well get the house. I'm a rich little bitch if you consider how much I make at work, and maybe someone from the other group missed a credit card payment once or something. It's all in the hands of greedy businesspeople now. And, oddly, I feel safer for the fact that it is.

Brought to you by Jolt Cola, with
the buzzing and mild irritation of
caffeine induced paranoia.

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