Home Sweet Home

We were given a house. A whole house, a real house with three bedrooms and a bathroom and a kitchen and everything. Given, as in free, as in donated. Well, actually it was signed over to Kirk and his siblings by Kirk's father. (have I mentioned how amazingly lucky we are in terms of family? How fantastic our families are. Needs mentioning again)

That meant that my long-suffering parents were able to get us out of their house (for a while), and we had, for the only time in our marriage, a house of our (sort of) own.

There were a few drawbacks to it. The shower had a wall without any tile on - just bare cement board, a couple of windows were broken, the front door was in pretty bad shape, the front yard was blessed with a vigorous grove of bamboo (anyone with experience of this grass variant is sending me huge sympathy thoughts right now), and the last tenant had left a massive amount of debris piled up in the side yard.

She left her stove as well, but she said this proudly because she seemed to think it was an extremely generous move on her part.

'And,' she said, to clinch the deal 'the dead mouse smell is completely gone.'