Going camping...in our living room!

Finally, I have cracked the apartment hunting code and we have a place we really love. We were the very first people to see this place, and we adored it. I loved it for two reasons, and the first reason is simply that it's a great apartment. The second is that as we were walking out of the apartment, the realtor stopped dead in her tracks and starred, awe-struck and blushing, at the neighbor's window.  It appears that the neighbor guy has a window in his shower, but the window is without a curtain. And, as luck would have it, the neighbor is very, very well built. Anyway, we immediately called the landlord to tell him we were interested. Naively, I thought it would be a done deal, but no, he wanted to audition us.

"Yeah, well, I have several other people interested in looking at the apartment," he tells me over the phone. "Why don't you write me an email and tell me a little bit about yourselves, and I'll get back to you within 48 hours."

This surprised me, as you can well imagine. The real estate market in Cincinnati works much differently--that is, you say you want the apartment, but only if the landlord will drop the rent a bit, and then the landlord takes your money and thanks you. Not so here. But no need to fear, because I wrote the most sickeningly adorable email you have ever read, and the landlord called me back to offer me the place the following morning.

 

The only problem is that the moving company messed up and now all of our stuff is arriving a month late, so we will be camping in our apartment for a while. the pictures you see above are from the listing on the New Zealand equivalent of Craigslist, so the furnishings are no longer here. We are doing pretty well, though. I'm becoming a much more creative cook given our very limited selection of cookware, and the "table" we've been eating on is, in fact, a sturdy cardboard box I pulled out of recycling and covered with an attractive dishtowel (and a candle--it makes it classy). Only four to six weeks more of camping, and then we'll have our stuff, or at least in theory we will. I sent the moving company some pretty belligerent emails (being unemployed gives you lots of time to do stuff like that), so hopefully they won't send our stuff to Fiji and sell it to the locals.