A little impatient but working things out.
Tuesday, 09.22.2015 - 10:59 pm.

We found a house! A typical, tall British brick house. We'll sign the lease on Friday and we already bought two beds (one for us, one for visitors *wink*) and a dining table. We went to a charity shop and we...well, I can't tell if we got a good deal or not. We found them to be still expensive, as large furniture usually is, but less so than in some stores we browsed online.

Also, the house is expensive. We went for it because we were desperate. I mean, we went for it because it was very nice, too. We have our cats in a cattery for a week, because one of them, Nico, was restless and we didn't want to get our hosts in trouble. Landlords and real state agencies are pretty adamant on the "no pets allowed" policy for tenants, so Andrew and I called, e-mailed, visited personally many agencies from Friday to Monday, and we always got a no. Until one said they'd ask the landlord and the landlord said yes. It was nearly out of our budget and slightly farther than we wanted from the university, but whatever. It is very nice and is 25 minutes walking downhill from the house to the university (on the other hand, it must be like 35 minutes uphill from the university to the house).

We need to get a lot of money by Friday to pay for the deposit and the first month's rent, and we still haven't gotten our scholarship money, nor we know when we will. We don't even have a bank account here because university registration isn't until Friday, and we need a letter to attest we're enrolled. AND the bank accounts from Chile, which we are using right now, are giving us trouble. We're working with our savings when the cards allow us. I have some savings indeed, but I was precisely saving them to buy Andrew and I plane tickets to spend Christmas with my family in Houston. Hopefully I'll be able to make up for the money I've taken from that stash once the scholarship starts flowing.

Because of house, cat and bank concerns, I haven't quite tuned into the PhD program. But I already met my supervisor and tomorrow we have an induction event. Also, all that house hunting got us walking around town (and uphill, Jesus Christ) and that made us get to know the city better. I love it and I want to stay here forever!

I kind of wanted to come here and whine a little, about how settling down is going slow and seems uncertain, but eh. I'm happy to be here, and all in all, things are working out. Days are indeed going by slowly and I cannot wait until Saturday, when we move into the house and we get Marla and Nico back. But we're getting there. It's best to focus on right now and get busy, to get to the weekend faster.

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