Coffeehouse.co.nz

I lied.

Boo hoo hoo.

Sometime this morning some big booming noises started to echo across the dock…  Took us a while to work out what was going on. There was a big dragon-boat event going on.

Quite impressive to watch, but seems like all too much hard work on a lovely sunny day…

Immediate panic over.  All the advice we’ve had confirms that we’ve got at least 3 weeks minimum until the time that bailiffs could turn up at the door. Whew!

And in even better news, we think we’ve found a flat to move into. In another block of apartments just across the road, so moving should be reasonably easy. It’ll be the second time in London we’ve moved just down the road we’ve been living on. We still got a man and a van for that move as there were lots of stairs involved then and it was a bit further away, but this time we might either do it ourselves or just get some guys without the van, but with some trolleys.

So assuming our reference checks all come back fine (and there’s no reason they shouldn’t that we know of, unless we catch something nasty from the landlord’s issues)  we can stop worrying about finding somewhere and just worry about packing.

Did I mention that I hate moving?

As of last night we live in uncertain times. It appears our landlord has been lying to us and this flat is due to be repossessed by his bank. In a week.

AAAARRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

We did know that there were issues, but he’d told the property management company that they were all sorted out, and he was paying the mortgage again. The lying *#&#^#£&* $£#&#$ #$#%#£&$££$!!!

What that really means for us we’re not quite sure yet. Worst case is we’ve got a week to move, or face not being able to get into the flat one day next week. But I’m pretty sure it’s not quite that bad. Still pretty bad, but not that bad. I think best case we will get another 28 days from next week, which at least will give us time to find somewhere to live!

Looking on the (very small) bright side, one impact of his lying to us that things were all sorted out might be that we didn’t end up being in exactly the same situation in an identical flat one flight up. When we heard he had issues, we thought of moving, and there was a flat just upstairs that would have made moving easy. But we believed him and didn’t (purely to avoid the hassle of moving). And now the property management company tell us that that landlord now appears to be going into liquidation too. Looks like the falling house market here is claiming quite a few victims.

Unfortunately some of them are us, and other tenants around the place.

What has struck me about this whole saga is how little rights tenants have, and how little information they/we are entitled to. It’s perfectly possible that the first thing a tenant would know about any of this is when the eviction notice arrives. Doesn’t seem very fair to me, but there you go.
More information on the situation as it comes to hand…

Sigh.

I really, really hate moving!

I’ve never understood the giving of flowers. It just seems a bit pointless and mean to give someone something that just sits there and dies at you, dropping it’s leaves and stuff all over the place.

Now in a garden, that’s different. That’s where they belong. (Except roses. I’ve never really liked them much, except for the climbing ones. Scraggly looking plants that bite you are not my favourite things.)

But Bec seems to like them, as do most women I know, and occasionally wishes that I’d bring her some. Well, kind of. I think if I did buy her some now her first thought would be that I’d done something really, really, really bad!

Just as well some of her friends give her some now and then!

Any regular readers of this blog will have noticed the distinct lack of chilli entries this year. That’s because there really hasn’t been much to say! As I suspected, the plants don’t seem to have been getting enough sunlight to really have a go at producing too many chillies. That’s not to say there aren’t any on them. There are a few on most of the plants, but it’s taken a long time for them to get to any reasonable size.

But the first one to appear, long before the rest, came in handy the other day. I’d noticed it going yellow one day, and by the next it was almost completely yellow. Didn’t muck about!

And just as well. The next day we were making a recipe that called for 1 yellow chilli.

So we used it, and it was good!

Autumnal.  I think I like that word.  It just seems to roll out of the mouth nicely.

However, I’m not quite sure I like what it refers to.  We seem to have moved almost straight into autumn this week.  While we had a nice sunny weekend for a change, it was still cold enough to require a jersey to sit out in the sun.  The nights are a lot colder. And the days are getting very noticeably shorter.

At least the trees aren’t yet changing colour to make it really, really obvious that the summer is over.

Let’s just hope it’s a blip this week, and we’ll be back to some Indian summer weather for at least the rest of this month.

Somehow I doubt it though!