#336

The Halls of Arden Vul

Another week of quiet progress, though the players are starting to think more seriously about how to make their major objective—wiping out the Cult of Set—actionable.

They’ve correctly identified that one of the major obstacles to overcome is the Sun-Scarred Knights, who value peace and stability and wouldn’t be convinced to turn a blind eye with moral arguments like “but the Setites are evil slavers!” and they’ve started to enact a plan to get a third major faction on their side, so they can go to the Knights and justify the war while backed up with representatives of some people who could seriously harm the peace and stability of the dungeon if they wanted to.

It’s with a great sense of dramatic irony that I look forward to seeing this plan unfold.

House Buying

Received some bad news this week: the landlord is not renewing my tenancy after all, as she wants to sell the flat. I’ve been serviced notice of eviction.

I have to leave on the 29th of May.

On the one hand, this is incredibly frustrating and perfectly shows why I dislike renting. Every year the letting agency asks me, well in advance, if I want to renew the tenancy, and I reply in the affirmative straight away. Then multiple months pass in silence, if I reach out “oh the landlord is still deciding what to do”, and I only learn I can stay (or not, in this case) around two months before the end of the tenancy. I get it, tenancies come to an end eventually, but would it be so much to ask that the landlord gives me as much notice as I give them?

On the other hand, this has finally pushed me into seriously looking at buying a place. I don’t want this annual uncertainty any more. I’m tired of throwing away money on rent, with nothing to show for it at the end. The so-called flexibility of renting is greatly overstated.

I’ve put together list of nice properties, visited the best one on Friday, and will put an offer in tomorrow. I’m told house-buying is a terrible process that takes months—it took one person on my team at work over a year to buy her current flat—and I don’t understand why, it’s not like houses are a new thing; I’ll just have to do all I can to push the process through as quickly and smoothly as possible, and if I have to put all my stuff in storage and live out of a hotel for a week or two, so be it.

Hopefully the update next week will be that my offer has been accepted, I’ve arranged a survey and enlisted a conveyancer, and the mortgage application has been submitted.