Time to move on...

The house in Cape Town has sold, just as we are about to move into our new house in Joburg. It is a bittersweet moment for me, as it was costing us R12K month to make the monthly payments on it while it sat empty and forlorn, so we needed to sell it. But it also marks the death of that faint flicker of hope that we may someday return to Cape Town. Cape Town, in terms of property prices, is a lot like Silicon Valley...if you manage to be lucky enough to buy a property there, once you sell and move away, you are unlikely to ever be able to afford to move back.

It has been an eventful...not happily so...winter. I have learned I have cataracts and must have surgery on both eyes, I am diabetic and so far, that is not going very well. Saturday (two days from now) we begin moving into the new house, but the seller is being difficult...we still don't have keys...even though the transfer is complete and we now own the house.

I am just getting over a stomach bug and, of course, there was my foot giving me fits and bed rest until I thought I would go stir crazy. I'm trying to find the upside, but so far it eludes me.

I have been here just under nine months. I am sorry, but Joburg does not touch me the way Cape Town did. I've found little positive and tons negative...and it's not that I'm look for itm either, it just comes up and slaps me in the face. Like potholes in the road that are so bad they rip the front license plate off an SUV and that was in one of the expensive, "up market" neighbourhoods.

Hubby's car is hanging in the balance...the insurance company wants to scrap it and pay us out R164,000 even though it would cost only R100,000 to fix it and it is fixable. How's that? They want to spend more to scrap a car that can be repaired? How does that work? We don't want to scrap it...I feel like I have fallen down the rabbit hole or have stepped through the Looking Glass. Since when to the insured have argue against more money from the insurance company?

Final packing surge tomorrow...kitchen, bathroom, closets...they've been reduced to bare essentials, now it is time to empty them out. Saturday the move starts, it will take five days (two days of us moving boxes, two days of the moving company loading the furniture, one day for delivery). By this time next week I'll be in my new house, but since the telephone company around here is best known for its indolence and incompetence, it will be as much as a month before I have an internet connection again.

So, keep well all of you, and I'll try to steal a bit of Hubby's cell-phone connection to the web if I can, otherwise, see ya when we get back on line!