Well the bank has come back and said "Yes Daniel, you can borrow a bunch of money to buy a house and pay it back over the next decade or two, earning us a bunch of interest in the process".
So, next step is to psyche myself up and make an offer for The House… and keep looking around at one or two others that have caught my eye.
 At St Kilda Beach |
 Lazing on the pier at St Kilda Beach on a sunny holiday afternoon |
Music is one of those things which is greatly enhanced when it’s a shared cultural experience. A concert or a dance is much more enjoyable when not only you, but everyone else around you is familiar with the material - or if not, at least appreciative of the performance. So many concerts are made or broken by the crowd.
My friend Danielle was down from Sydney this week, and it rapidly became apparent that in our musical spheres, there is little common ground. She’s aNova andMix listener - I’mJJJ andPBS. And never the Twain shall meet.
So she’d be talking about some top 40 hit, or playing me some MP3 she’d found, or showing me a promotional CD
she had, almost incredulous that I hadn’t heard them. Occasionally I could justifiably claim that I’d heard a snippet of one of them on the radio, but for the most part it’s true: I have no idea who the fuck any of them are. Does that make me an old fuddy duddy as far as music goes? Perhaps.
On Thursday night we went to the Palace at St Kilda for theMS benefit gig. Ahhh… a host of big names of the (mostly) local music industry:Dan Kelly and the Alpha Males, Dan Brodie, Dallas Crane (okay I admit it, I’m not familiar with him), most ofthe Cruel Sea (with special guestMichael Franti from Spearhead), and Paul Kelly (with special guest Renee Geyer). It was huge. The crowd were into it, especially when Franti took the stage. Was Danielle impressed? I rather think not actually. Wrong sphere, you see.
But no matter. The Palace was an interesting venue. They had a smoke free room upstairs, from which you could watch the concert through a glass pane. Shame the sound was so muffled in there, and smokers kept sneaking in. Still, it provided some respite from the delightful aroma of cigarettes. Maybe one day the situation will be reversed, and the smokers will be confined up there.
On Friday we wandered around the beach, and up to the Shrine. TheANZAC Day activities had died down by then, but there were still a lot of people about. Okay call me a wimp for not having gone to the dawn service, but the concert the night before had gone until about 2am.
As 5pm approached and the Shrine shut for the day, a uniformed soldier pulled the flags down off the flag pole with some difficulty, at one point the huge flag engulfing him almost completely. I didn’t see if he managed to fold it up neatly without help.
On Saturday night after dropping Danielle back at the airport to fly home, I had a walk around the street with the prospective house in it. It was something I always planned to do in that situation - a kind of test to determine if there were noisy neighbours in the vicinity, as there are where I live now. All was quiet. No noisy parties. No cars up on blocks in the gardens. No howling dogs. No scary deranged-looking people walking the street. No yoofs on the corner. Just a quiet, peaceful evening in suburbia. It was not an exhaustive test by any means, but the walk was pleasant, and it gave me a chance to work off dinner.
I picked up the registered letter from the post office, and sure enough it’s a notice to vacate. But it’s 90 days. This is good, as I was expecting 60 days. Under law it’s 60 days if they want to use the property for another purpose (eg renovating it and selling it to yuppies and making a shit load of money) but 90 days if they give no reason whatsoever. They’re giving no reason whatsoever. Fair enough, that means I have an extra 30 days to play with. And I know the reason - they’ve already started doing over the vacant flat.
What of my home’s prospective replacement? Machinations with the bank have continued. Their promise of quick and easy results via their web site have proven disappointing, so it was a relief to go in there today and face them jowl to jowl. I made sure to put on my best clobber, so I looked like I didn’t need the money (which I don’t really… owning my own home is not an essential, it’s just on the top of my To Do list at the moment). I didn’t notice until I was almost there that a tiny spot of toothpaste was on the front of my shirt. D’oh.
Not that it mattered. As you’d expect with banks, it’s pretty much all about the money. Showing you have a bunch saved up, showing you earn enough to cover the repayments. My very nice spotty yellow and blue tie probably didn’t help at all.
The lady seemed keen to acquire my business, maybe she saw interest payment dollar signs before her eyes. It took no nudging at all for her to waive the $600 loan establishment fee, for instance. And although she couldn’t give on-the-spot approval due to me being a self-employed contractor type, she expects when the final word comes down the line in a (business) day or two, it will be good news.
And as for the house in question? I like it a little bit more every time I think about it. Great spot, on a side street but walking distance to two shopping centres, train, tram and even the bus toChaddy. I’m going to go for a look after dark to try and ascertain if there are any noisy-at-night neighbours, and will be getting it checked over by experts, but I anticipate full steam ahead. It’s not scheduled for auction yet, so if all goes well, I’ll be able to put in an offer pronto, before anybody else even thinks about looking at it.
Tonight I got home to find a note saying there’s a registered letter waiting for me at the post office. Which, unless something completely and utterly unexpected has arrived for me by registered mail, means I have sixty days to move out. No surprise really - they’ve already started ripping the guts out of the vacant flat downstairs and replacing it with shiny new kitchen and bathroom stuff, waking my gently sleeping houseguest Danielle in the process.
Things are progressing slightly less speedily than I hoped on the buy-a-house-to-avoid-moving-ever-again front. Sure, the bank may claim to give you an answer to anonline home loan application within 24 hours… but in practice, it goes off to their people, gets kicked around a bit, and you end up ringing them up on the good ol’ analogue telephone a week later to chase it down. They ring you back, you ring them back, and eventually you end up scheduling a face to face appointment anyway. Not very 21st century, is it.
Ah well. So the appointment is tomorrow morning. Fingers crossed that they want to earn heaps of interest payments off me. If not, I’ll have to startshopping around.
And I’m thinking about moving this site to an Australian (faster, and hopefully cheaper) web host. I reckon that move should be a little less painful.
Today I was out grave digging… uhhh, grave hunting with Danielle, who is down from Sydney for the week hunting down ancestors. We tracked down a house in Malvern where one of them used to live, then went toSt Kilda Cemetery to potter about among the graves. Creepy? No, not really. It was a glorious day, and (at least at times) the sun shone down among the gravestones. Now, it might be a tad more creepy wandering around there at the dead of night during a full moon, but I’ll leave that experience to my imagination, since it’s not something I plan on ever doing.
Our directions were something akin to a treasure map, pointing us along a path, past a tree, to the third path on the left and forty-five paces south. No need to cry "Yo ho ho" or hop about on one leg - we found the relevant graves without too much trouble. I also got to try out the spiffy multi-picture panorama feature of my new camera, which is not too bad at all.
Most interesting. Makes me wish I had relatives who lived around here. One day I’ll have to go exploring Northern Queensland to find some of mine. One day.
 St Kilda Cemetery - click for a larger, spookier version. |
Feel much better now, though I didn’t get much sleep last night. I remember going to bed about midnight, and trying to get to sleep, and every so often looking at the clock with increasing frustration… 1:00… 2:30… 3:30… 4:00… and thinking oh, this is getting ridiculous. What caused that? Surely not the few squares of chocolate and glass of lemonade that I had before bedtime? Was my body so deprived of food over the previous 48 hours that the energy from those kept me awake for all those hours? Hmmm.
On another note, after reading in the paper todayabout the hardware stores complaining about the trading bans on Good Friday and Easter Sunday… I suddenly thought how funny it is that on Good Friday, you can’t go out and buy a packet of nails anywhere!
And so it began, last night, a joyful night of gastroenteritis. It’s gone around some of the rest of my family, but by golly it was my turn. Thankfully not as painful or traumatic as last time I was sick (hmm, exactly a month ago, too), but not exactly pleasant.
So today I’ve spent the day at home, resting, primarily from the lack of sleep last night. It’s amazing how slowly the day can go when you’re spending it doing next to nothing. I keep looking at the clock, being amazed it’s only X o’clock, instead of X+2 o’clock.
2:05pm. Oh FFS, Mr Speakerphone’s office just got invaded with one of his colleagues and his entire family. Come to admire the view. So, the 28th floor is a fucking tourist attraction now? Am I the only one doing any work here? (Well, apart from stopping in anger to write this, that is.) Time for a blast of Quadrophenia. Ahhhhh… loud angry music… that’s better.