Frustration. And some cute photos.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about a few things that were annoying me here. Well here is an update:

1. Boiler - FINALLY got the British Gas guy over to see it last week and he fixed it. Lovely. No more banging at 1am.

2. British Gas helpline - hate it. They set up a time for the guy to come and then he didn't come. When I called them to find out why, they said they had no record of my call. After I told them that, actually, I had a record since my phone line at work is recorded, they arranged for someone to come the following day, within a two-hour window (amazing, since they always say they only have 5-hour windows).

3. Our mortgage provider - we STILL haven't seen the mortgage offer. F me.

4. Our council - we had been buying weekly visitor parking passes to tide us over until we could get Goddess/Saviour/Nanny on the electoral roll, but when we went to get more this past weekend they told us that we had "used up our annual allotment" of weekly passes. But we were free to buy unlimited daily passes. Ah, the logic that is a civic agency.

Other than that there is the flat purchase which I wrote about a month ago. Which is kind of related to the mortgage offer. But the turn of events is even worse than anticipated. It is now four months since the offer was made. In the last two weeks we have (finally) received a load of stuff from the vendor's solicitor - due to the fact that we threatened to pull out of the purchase. Well. In the pack of information was a wad of correspondence between the vendor and the management company (since it is leasehold there is a management company who (yes) manages the day-to-day running of the common areas of the building and all the financials) - apparently the 'slight' insurance dispute that the estate agent mentioned to me in passing when we made the offer has more to it than meets the eye. Apparently the vendor has been disputing all the fees for almost a year. Apparently the fees have more than doubled in the past two years since the freehold was sold and a new management company was appointed (remind me to elucidate on freehold vs. leasehold at some point; I'm not going to do that now because it's too boring for words). And this dispute has not been resolved.

Last Friday we threatened to pull out (again - we are losing credibility here) if the dispute is not satisfactorily resolved. Miraculously the estate agent called on Monday morning and said the dispute was now resolved and we were all ready to go. We said, great, let us look at the latest correspondence and we'll get a move on.

Yesterday we received a copy of the letter the vendor's solicitor sent to ours. It was pathetic - a two-sentence paragraph stating that they were writing to confirm the insurance fees allocated to the vendor had been agreed with the management company and that the vendor was hopeful it would amount to half of what had previously been charged. No mention of the other fees. But the kicker was the 'hopeful' comment. I can just see it now - we complete the purchase and then we're the 'hopeful' ones. Yeah, I'm 'hopeful' I'll win the lottery, but it ain't happening! What a bunch of wankers.

So needless to say, I wrote a very polite letter to the estate agent today saying that 'hopeful' ain't gonna cut it and we're withdrawing our offer. Back to the drawing board.

I feel for my brother-in-law...while he and Kate are building a wonderful relationship, he is almost 30 years old and sharing a room should be a thing of the past. Hopefully we can sort out the new place (well we wouldn't have pulled out without a backup!) soon and get him into his own room where he can hang posters of Pam Anderson or Jordan if he so chooses.

On the Kate side, here are a couple of cheesy photos (and a couple of cute ones!) of her. She really hams it up for the camera now. What's bizarre is that we were looking in the Argos catalogue yesterday and when she saw pictures of cameras she started grinning her grin-mace at it.





'Grin-mace 1'














'Grin-mace 2'













Daddy lovin' Kate












I couldn't resist including this one.























Guess what everyone's getting for Christmas this year? Reminds me a bit of this: http://www.turtlekiss.com/ but I don't think we can make as much money out of it.