Hello Old Friends

The big move has happened, during a downpour, no less. The soaking I got while moving loads of stuff out of the old place and into the new has landed me with a cold. So once again, I'm sat at home with my trusty box of tissues, my collection of movies and books, and surrounded by half empty boxes, but with little enough idea of where the rest of my stuff is.

There's an added complication with the new place though. Because right now it's feeling like I'm not just sharing it with L. I've been home from work three days due to separation anxiety with my tissues. And of those 3 days, I've had unannounced visitors on 2. Because L made the horrendous mistake of giving her parents a spare key.

They mean well, I know they do. The first visit was to drop off L's surprise birthday present, a ladder that they left set up at the end of her bed. Today's is to make some adjustments to some dodgy plumbing in the back yard. So it's not like they're dropping in to have lunch in the house, or something. But as a person who is not related to them, and whose own parents would never dream of stopping by a shared house without giving some kind of heads up first, I find it strange. It's especially awkward given that I'm still in my pyjamas today. I mean, I could have been coming out of the shower, or anything.

It makes me a little concerned for the future of the sharing. Because I like my own space, and I like it to stay my own space. I find it a bit strange and off-putting that someone else's parents can - and will - just randomly drop by unannounced, even if we're not home. I'm not saying that they shouldn't visit, far from it. But I'm getting the feeling that sharing with L when her parents are half an hour away is going to be very different to sharing with L when they're half a world away. And I'm not entirely convinced that it's going to work.

Thank god she is planning on getting the keys back off them when our other old London flatmate C comes to visit at the end of the month. Maybe then it will feel more like it's my home, rather than having a sense that I'm just dossing.

The Valley of Decision

It all began with a text message.

Well actually, it didn't, it began long before that, but it went up a gear when I got the message on Saturday.

"Holy crap!!! I just bought a house!!!"

Yep, L has finally found her dream home and managed to buy it on the first try. And when she stopped shaking like a leaf and reality set in, she repeated an offer that was made a long time ago, way back in London, in fact. She asked if I'd consider sharing with her again.

I considered it. I weighed it against my other options. One one side, there's my current flatmate, the bane of my existence and the reason that I now understand the difference between being messy and being dirty. For anyone who's confused, I'm the first one, and she's the second. I never knew how frustrating it must have been for the OCD L to share with my messiness, until I was confronted with someone who was fine with leaving chunks of food in random places in the kitchen, who has yet to learn that bathroom basins need the occasional clean, and that floors don't mop themselves; until I found myself turning into my mother and bitching about doors left wide open and letting the heat out. From another angle, I could scrape together the cash to live alone once more. It would mean writing off my travel plans for the next while, and probably putting off all sorts of other plans as well, but it could probably be done. And then there's sharing with L, someone that I know both can and will drive me nuts on occasion, but will also let me raid both her bookshelves and her DVD collection, will clean up after me in a most considerate way, and will make me laugh.

In the end, the decision was a no brainer, so I called up the property managers of my flat to find out about the logistics of extending my lease long enough to allow L to settle on her house and get herself organised. After a brief misunderstanding where they thought I was wanting to renew for another 12 months - panic stations - it's all organised. All except telling my flatmate.

In a twist, she's been the perfect flatmate since I made the decision. She's emptied bins, replaced toilet rolls and chatted away like she hasn't since I first met her way back in February. And I have to go and spoil all of that. It's going to be awkward, if only because when I go I'm taking all of my furniture with me, and that includes the bed she sleeps in. But what can I do? What else would I want to do?

Now to screw up the courage for the big conversation...Yep. Decisions. They can really make me stressed.

Two strikes

It's been one of those days. It started with allergies, cleared up in the middle, and is ending with some sort of nightmarish sequence of stupid events and unhealthy levels of failure at anger management. Perhaps I should just start with some of the good bits, and let it progress from there.

Today is my sister-in-law's birthday, an occasion that my mother used as an excuse to test the waters of my brothers' new tolerance for each other. It's a long time since they would be able to be in the same room with each other, let alone the slight thawing of their demeanour which has seen them both participating in the same conversation - although still not talking directly to each other. Between them cracking jokes at either end of the table, and my two year old whirlwind of a niece playing up for her audience, the night was going pretty well. Some quiet chat with Mum and Dad afterwards - yes, I know, it's sad, but when you're single and broke you have to make the most of all interaction, not to mention the free food that comes with one of Mum's cooking spectaculars - and I was ready to head home and throw my phone on the charge. A bit of light reading before bed while I got some juice back into the batteries, to make sure it would last the night and wake me up in the morning. It just flashed at me with a battery warning light when I tried to make it do something. Note to self: leaving the MSN app running in the background all day chews through batteries like nothing else.

So I packed my many bags of goodies and headed homewards, feeling pretty safe in the knowledge that the flatmate would have arrived home before me and, if not warmed the flat, at least put the bins out. Sadly, no. As I parked my car, I drove past both of the bins which should have been on the nature strip. A quick check of the letterbox revealed that it was also not as it should have been. Thinking flatmate mustn't be home yet, I trudged up the stairs and rummaged in my bag for my keys.

Not there.

A vision came to me of throwing them on my desk at work, and another, later vision, of them being under a pile of papers. Still. And my phone was dead. But when I reached the top of the stairs, thinking to have another good rummage in my Tardis of a handbag, I noticed that the security door was ajar. Flatmate must be home, thank god, I thought, willing to overlook transgressions of bin and letterbox maintenance in return for being let in. I pushed the button for the doorbell, and waited.

Fine, I thought, when two more pushes had failed to yield a flatmate. She's probably in her room - where else would she be, actually? - so I'll just knock. Now I have a truly fearsome rap when I'm trying to get in somewhere. Not only has it terrified schoolies into quietude in beachside hotels, it has brought the rowdiest of neighbours to turn down their stereos. It's a knock worthy of the old ladies who live downstairs and sit in judgement on the goings on of the flats. A truly fantastic weapon to have in your arsenal when you're locked out and your apparently partially deaf flatmate is inside. Make that completely deaf. She didn't come to the door. OK, I told myself. It's 10:30, she might just be security conscious. I called out. Nothing. I thought I could hear running water inside, so I waited for it to stop and then tried again. Nada.

By this point I was fuming. Not only had she not put out the bins, but she was leaving me locked out on a bloody cold night. And this following hard on the heels of the Great Cooking Mess of 2011. Not going well at all, here. I knew what I had to do, but I was dreading doing it. Finally getting angry enough, I stormed downstairs and back to my car, bag of leftovers over my wrist. Throwing the car into gear and speeding onto the roads, I headed back to Mum and Dad's to pick up my spare keys, just hoping that they hadn't gone to bed yet, and that a knock on the door at 10:45 wouldn't give them heart failure.

An angry rant and a serious risk of speeding fines later, and my spare keys let me into the flat. The only sign that flatmate had been home, other than the unlocked wire door, was the firmly closed bedroom door, as opposed to the slightly ajar state that it gets left in when she's not home.

Banging and clattering around for a bit to get my own back, I decided to open the mail. One of the letters was a warning about an outstanding amount of rent, which I had tried without success to chase up before. This time it was different, and I felt like screaming. The amount listed as the rent we should be paying is $4 a month more than the weekly calculation suggests it should be. That's the difference in the rent that they are chasing. If they really want the extra 84 cents a week, the bastards can fight for it. I'm in no mood to be trifled with, and, based on the mounting headache, it's a mood that will linger through until morning. That this is the second time they've attempted to extract the cash from me has made me think that, as much as I love the flat, I may be moving on come September when the lease is up. Heaven help them if they fight back against the logical arguments I will attempt to make. Because I sure as hell won't.

Domestic Bliss

It's a few months now since the decision to get a flatmate. She moved in, and nothing has really been quite the same since. You'd hope I meant that in a good way, but really, no. It's not that we hate each other, or bicker, or anything drastic, really. But there is a chronic incompatibility looming on the horizon, and I don't think she's even noticed it.

She's a nice enough person, I suppose. Quite friendly, not hugely annoying, and keeps very much to herself. In fact most of the time, I'm not entirely sure if she's home or not. I have to peek through cracks or look for light shining under doors to get a sense of whether I'm alone or potentially have company. The general consensus is that it's an odd relationship in the flat. And that was before she started eating all of her meals in her room, as well spending the rest of her time holed up in there. In some respects, I guess she's the perfect flatmate. She pays bills on time, she's quiet, and she never hogs the couch or forces me to watch TV shows I don't like. But although I'm never sure of her current presence or absence, I can usually tell when she's been around.

Now I'm not the greatest with all things housekeeping. I vacuum the carpets once a month if I'm lucky, and do the shower once a quarter. Dishes are washed only when the pile on the sink gets too precarious, or there's a danger of being so many that need washing that they won't fit on the dish drainer. If I remember to change my sheets regularly, and actually have them washed by the time it occurs to me to change them again, I'm doing pretty well. But there are some things that I figure it's only fair to keep on top of when you're sharing. I think it would have been even more important if that sharing involved the use of someone else's things. But no, apparently not.

When I moved into this flat, everything I owned was new. Except my couch. And my kitchen table. And the antique bits and pieces. But you get the picture. The plates had never been eaten off. The sheets had never been slept on. The towels had never been used. The saucepans had never cooked anything. It was all still in quite good shape when she moved in. That can no longer be said about some things. It's to the point where, after helping me out while I was laid up with my back, my mother has been forced to offer me advice on how to get the saucepans back into something like a good condition, after months of things being cooked onto the sides. You can pick which pans she uses most often; they're the ones which are the most filthy outside, to the point that I can't get them clean even with steel wool, and have a soap scum residue inside them. You're supposed to wash pans AFTER cooking, not before.

And I could write it off if it was just pans, even if my pointed scrubbing of pans I haven't used has failed to have an effect (passive aggressive behaviour? perhaps, but direct suggestions for a cleaning roster have failed to have any impact). But being flat out with back pain and seeing your flatmate take the vacuum out for the first time ever, only to do her own room, having never cleaned the shower, never mopped any of the floors, it's getting a little much. I think the final straw came this weekend.

I haven't been using the cooktop much recently, at least partly because of the depressing state of my pans. But it drove me to the point of action on Saturday. I tried to clean the cooktop, because it was beginning to look like a bio-hazard; baked on sauce, overspill, actual chunks of food. But it wouldn't just wipe down. It required an actual cleaning product. I've never had to use a product to clean a cooktop before, I've always been able to manage it along the way. When I picked up the metal grate that covers the jets and found it was sticky and coated in a thick layer of baked on sludge, I was fuming. It drove me mad, to the point where I actually finished a cleaning job and looked for more - an unheard of phenomenon. I vacuumed. I spot cleaned the carpet. I swept. I mopped. By the time my sister-in-law popped in for a visit, the place was worthy of my mother's stamp of approval. I even changed the tea towels on the kitchen rail - yet another something that seems to fall into my area of responsibility. The flat was gleaming. The stove looked brand new. It was pristine. Then I headed out for dinner.

I was out again tonight. When I got home, there were once again unwashed saucepan lids on the stove. There was also cooked on sauce and a chunk of unidentifiable vegetable. There was also a load of washing that had been sitting in the washing machine all afternoon. Too bad if I needed to use it.

Individually, most of the problems I'm having with this girl aren't major. But the whole package, from the way she acts like she is responsible for inspiring any physical activity I take up - hello, woman, I have 2 prolapsed discs, you think I'm going to be taking up marathon running right now? But you're the only reason I might decide to start an activity? Or wait, you're the one who "inspired" me to take regular walks all summer until my back got screwed up, even though you didn't move in until February? Genius - to her complete inability to realise that you need to clean the kitchen floor when you spill stuff on it, or that pasta sauce will stain white cupboards if you leave it caked on dribbling down the front of them for a week or more, it all adds up and it's all driving me completely insane right now. And I'm at a loss for how to approach the problem in a way that won't blow up in my face, because clearly just leaving it until she notices have absolutely no impact at all.

How do you tell someone that you think they're a slob and that if they don't pull their finger out you're not going to be letting them use your stuff anymore? How do you suggest to a flatmate that the experiment isn't working, and that they should find somewhere else to live when the lease is up for renewal? And how do you bitch and moan to a friend who is about to buy a 4 bedroom house, without any intention of accepting the invitation to share that house?

Because L is about to take the plunge into the real estate market. She wants someone to share her mini-mansion, and I fit the bill quite nicely. She knows I'm fed up with my current living arrangement, she knows we rub along well enough as flat mates - or at least she knows she can put up with my more annoying habits, and that I won't kill her for hers. But I don't think I'm ready to go and live in her house, and that's another conversation that I don't know how to have. That said, I think I have more clues on that one than I do on how to kick out my current flat mate. If I could re-negotiate my rent, I'd be happy enough to stay here on my own. But dear god, something better change soon.