dead gypsies

First things first: Mark feels strongly that I should have pictures in this post, but I don't have any pictures of what I'm writing about, so here are two "Mangatar avatars" of me and Mark from the Face Your Manga website.



That's done. On with the stuff I was gonna talk about.

So my lawyer called me this afternoon to discuss the only outstanding issue with our house purchase. We're trying to get a "location certificate", which seems to be one step down from a survey, done on the lot. There's a chance the neighbouring house encroaches on the property. We don't much care but would like to know exactly what is going on, and we might just try to negotiate some more on the price if it's true.

I heard a phrase from my lawyer that I thought we were done with. She started out by saying "well, I've never heard of this before" - UGH - I'm sick of hearing that. Apparently they can't produce the normal kind of survey documents because the property has roads on two sides of it and public land on the third. I'm guessing they need to measure from other properties that have already been measured?

WHATEVER.

So they apparently can't show us a sketch of the property, but they can give us a block of text that describes it... ?? .... and this is abnormal in some way and nobody knows what exactly should be done in this case... ??... brain... exploding...

Mark asked me if we ran over a gypsy on our road trip. Darn, she must have lived long enough to curse us. I can hear it now: "MAY THEIR HOUSE PURCHASES FROM THIS DAY FORWARD BE FROUGHT WITH PERIL AND UNPRECEDENTED PERSNICKITYNESS!"

Eeeek!

Change of subject. This past weekend we went to stay in an old farmhouse owned by family friends. There was power but no heat, and a toilet but no running water. Well, there was a woodstove in one part of the house, so there was some heat. It was Fun! No, that's not sarcasm, it was seriously fun. The dogs came along and Oliver wrapped EVERYONE around his little paw in about three and a half seconds. People were looking for excuses to pick him up the entire time, and getting mad at him when he skittered away from them, and then immediately forgiving him. Arlo had tons of fun too - he LOVES new people and noise and activity.

I'll put up some pictures of our weekend away as soon as I can steal them from our friend who, unlike me, actually used her camera over the weekend.