The House(s) of Fran_mart

For those who have wondered, Canberra is damn hot. At least the Chief Minister has stopped posturing about his defence against bushfires (due to the Coroner saying he basically failed this in 2003). Before leaving New York we had been corresponding with the owners of a rather interesting sounding property of 57 acres about 30 minutes out of Canberra. The online advert for it is http://allhomes.com.au/c/ah?a=sp&p=272760 . We duly visited it and rated it as really excellent. The difficulty was that they already had an offer (but not a contract) on it. We suggested what we could do as an offer if it became available and that was accepted. Hooray. Then off to a lawyers to arrange f9or contracts to be exchanged as quickly as possible. First issue was the owners had a mortgage with the Commonwealth Bank which will take three weeks to discharge. Then we got a huge list of things to check by our lawyer. Fortunately she is action oriented and was able to sort a lot of them within a...

We have now migrated from Manhatted to Weston, a suburb of Canberra. This was a painless process with a great flight across the Pacific. A Cro-Magnon from the Western suburbs of Sydney who occupied the QANTAS transfer desk at Kingsford Smith airport attempted to destroy the trip. Fortunately for us his coleagues in every other part of the airline rose to the occasion and delivered: 1) quality client service; and 2) our luggage to where it was intended to go. Since returning things have moved apace (although I am still unhappy with my running) and will be detailed in the next update of this blog. Hopefully that will happen in 2 or 3 days not the same number of months. Martin