Popular wisdom would have you believe that buying a house is one of life’s most stressful events, right behind the death of a partner or divorce. Having just this afternoon bought a house, I have to say: this is one of the least stressful transactions I’ve ever been through. Seriously. Easy peasy. A snap. Eight weeks start to finish. Done and dusted.

Although I know nothing about buying houses and even less about buying houses in Ireland, I am generally very lucky in finding people to work with who make being clueless easier. At this point I can say with some authority that I still know nothing about buying houses, but we’ve become very good at writing enormous cheques and in return, someone has given us keys to a building we apparently now own. This is due mostly to the efforts of these people:

• Mortgage Broker: We fall into the “specialist borrowers” category so we needed a mortgage broker. I worked with Jonathan O’Brien at White Star Mortgages. He was awesome, very responsive, and gets points for answering after hours emails from his Blackberry. I found him through AskAboutMoney when bitching about our first mortgage broker, who sucked out loud.
• Mortgage Company: Springboard. They do broker-only loans but had the best rate available to us, so I’m doubly glad we went through our fabulous broker.
• Conveyancing Solicitor: I found Aileen Walshe when looking for flat fee conveyancing that wasn’t done by the equivalent of a conveyancing sweatshop. She’s excellent. At one point she got in her car and drove to the seller’s solicitor to pick up the contracts they continually failed to put in the post. Even our estate agent said she was great. She charges €995 plus VAT.
• Auctioneer: Speaking of estate agents, ours was Dermot Lynch at James Coughlan. He drove me around Cork all afternoon one day, and since he’s done a bunch of property renovations, he was very handy to have in tow. He’s also lovely and smells gorgeous.

The flip side of there being no moments of horrendous stress is that there’s also been no joyous moment of “woot!” so far. I suspect that this is because I’ve treated this whole thing like a very tentative and theoretical house buying exercise: if we can get our cash in place, if someone is actually dumb enough to loan us a big pile of money, if we can find a house in our budget, if they accept our offer, if the mortgage company actually draws a cheque, if it actually closes.

I was sincerely prepared for this to fall through at any given if, but as it happens, they all fell in line. John let me know he’d picked up the keys this afternoon with a text message that says “zOMG H0WCE K33Z!!” He’s also been running around yelling “Get off my lawn!” for practice. At what, I’m not sure, since we won’t actually have a lawn, but I suppose “Get off my concrete!” doesn’t have the same ring to it. He’s really digging home ownership.

Me, I’m convinced the whole building will collapse during renovations, taking at least two adjoining neighbours with it. More than that, while I may be new at this, I know one thing for sure:

It isn’t the house buying that will kill you. It’s the house moving.

Absolutely ages ago, the absolutely fabulous Aoife tagged me for a Six Random Facts meme, and I completely dropped the ball because I couldn’t even keep track of the six things I had to do before lunch. Better late than never, though, so here are mine:

• I have prehensile toes, meaning I can (and do!) pick things up with them. Oddly enough, in all my years of writing about sex and sexuality, it is this single fact that resulted in the strangest and most fervent fan mail. Moral of the story: absolutely everything is somebody’s kink.
• I am mostly indifferent to insects - no girlish spider screeching here - but I used to passionately hate woodlice. Unfortunately, we have a very damp garden and thus, woodlice. I now perpetuate a very satisfying daily holocaust on the dozen or so who creep in the back door and am no longer squicked out by them. I am however disturbingly addicted to this little smashing ritual, and my husband has begun to look at me a bit oddly.
• On the other hand, I actually really like slugs. I find them terribly impressive and sort of endearingly dinosaur like, and I especially love their little horns. Since at least two slugs a night end up in our back hall (eating dead woodlice) or on the bathroom sink, this is a good thing.
• I like films but I’m not a huge fan of cinemas. I have not actually been to a cinema since 2005. Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith merely confirmed my suspicion that cinema tickets are not the best way to spend a million quid.
• I am addicted to the smell of detergent. I have no idea why. I just love industrial perfumes. I have an unnatural fondness for Dove soap, and I use Dove deodorant, and if Dove made perfume, I’d probably wear that, too.
• I like my husband so much I married him twice.

Now, according to the rules, I’m supposed to sic this meme on six other people but so much time has gone by that I think I’ve pretty much blown that one out of the water, and I’m not a huge fan of obligating people to play. Instead, here’s a simple curiosity request: show everyone where the magic happens.

We’re about to (fingers crossed) buy and renovate a house, so for the first time ever I’ll have some scope to design my own working space. I’m very excited about this, and I’d like to see yours. Home office, co-working office, actual office: just take a photo of where the work gets done and post it somewhere. Clean, dirty, it doesn’t matter; I just want to see it.

Bernie Goldbach, Damien Mulley, Jackie Danicki, Martha Rotter, Maryrose Lyons, and YourNameHere, I’m looking at you.

So yesterday was the official start date of a project I’ll be working on for the next week or so. Several steps of this project require me to have access for testing purposes to a particular piece of technological gadgetry which I do not own, so I arranged with their internal project manager to borrow one of these widgets for the duration.

This lovely, charming, but geographically challenged man is local to me, and so offered to drop the magical bag of telephony tricks directly to my door. As I am notoriously lazy, notoriously exhausted, and a rumoured agoraphobe (I’m not afraid to leave the house or anything, I just very rarely do), this sounded like a marvellous idea to me and I immediately gave him my address and directions.

“On Blarney Street, off Shandon Street, just past the post office.”

He promised to call me when he was on his way, and I crashed into the duvet and slept like the dead.

When the phone rang four hours later, I was still asleep and in a state of what might be best described as train wreck. My plan was to ignore the fact I was clad in my PJs and just brush my teeth, open the door, thank the nice man, and go back to bed. This plan was going roaringly well until he rang again to ask “Where are you? I’m at the post office.”

I stepped outside my door on the cordless to ask if he could see me, since I live mere steps away. Needless to say, he couldn’t, and after a bit of faffing we determined that he was: a) at the wrong post office; b) parked, and c) wandering around Shandon Street.

Make a note for future reference: most plans devised on four hours of sleep and no coffee have flaws. Tragically, at this critical juncture I was simply not awake enough to remember this.

“Right,” I said, “I’ll walk down the hill, you walk up the hill, and we’ll bump into each other in about two minutes.”

And so I did. I walked out in exactly what I was wearing, which was:

• Light pink pyjama bottoms with huge bright pink stars;
• A ratty Disney World sweatshirt circa 2000, complete with one hole and a bleach stain;
• Freshly washed hair, which I had kipped on whilst wet, and was now perfectly straight on the half I’d slept on and wonderfully curly on the side that had air dried.

I hurried, at some pace, down the hill. Past the post office. Past the school. Past the car dealership. Past everything, in fact, right down to Shandon Street. With each landmark I passed, the absolute humiliation of this sartorial parade of mine became ever more excruciating. The Yummy Mummys queued up for 3 PM pick-up looked every bit as horrified to see me as I was to see them; no doubt they thought this completely insane looking bag lady was going to make off with a complete matching set of Little Tarquins. Carriages were clamped. Babies were clutched. Children were told to avert their eyes.

As if all of this were not bad enough, it goes without saying that I never found him. And so back up the hill with me: past the garage, past the post office, and past the ladies who were now absolutely convinced I was a an unmedicated menace to society and stalking their offspring.

Finally back at home, the phone rang, a car drove up, and kit was delivered. I went back to bed and vowed to never, ever leave the house again.

Agoraphobia: it’s a plan.

I need, very badly, an accounts assistant.

In short, I need someone to come to my house, plop down on one of our many, many laptops, and enter invoices, payments, receipts and expenses into the spreadsheet supplied by my accountants, then file them carefully in some sort of tabbed monthly notebook thing. If this person could also go through our pile of bills and make me write cheques and then actually drop them in the post as well, I will love them forever. I need someone to do this with more financial accumen and love for spreadsheets than I myself posses.

I’m looking for someone for about 2 hours a week, and I’m probably looking for a SAHM or UCC student who just wants to put Accounting 101 to work for some extra cash. I love telecommuting but for this, I need an actual human - preferably a capable, competent one.

We are currently located in Cork’s city centre off of Shandon Street, and will (hopefully) be re-locating to very near UCC this summer. The upside is that I am the very definition of flexible; I don’t care what day or what time you come and it doesn’t need to be the same day or time each week. Also, the coffee here is very serious and the kettle is always on. The downside is that I smoke and I’m not planning to quit any time terribly soon.

If you know anyone or you yourself are interested in this gig, please send me either an informal CV or just an email to sabrina [at] sabrinadent [dot] com. Thanks!

So a couple of weeks ago I lost my phone, and while I enjoyed the momentary respite afforded by having nobody ring me, this is 2008 and a girl needs a phone. Over the course of a few retail trips, I had pretty much convinced myself to drop €400 on an iPhone, mostly just because I thought I should have one. But the iPhone, for all its wonders, has one major failing: it does not come in pink.

Which more or less explains why I instead walked out of The Carphone Warehouse with a Sony Ericson W580i Walkman™ Phone that cost, after trading in an old phone and signing up for the Meteor calling plan I wanted anyway, a grand total of €29. (Please note: I also have a new number - 085 702 8212.)

It is very, very pink. The front is pink. The back is pink. Slide it open, and the rear slide panel is practically fuchsia and glitters like a Barbie disco ball. The earbuds, too, are pink, as is the mic jack.

But my absolute favourite part is when you open it up, it has little pink rhinestones in between the numbers:

This phone is, in short, every 9 year old girl’s telecommunications dream. Given that I actually was 9 years old when I got my very first Walkman back in 1981, I’m enjoying the retro flashback. Back then, they were approximately the size of a paperback, weighed as much as a small child, and used this old fashioned music recording device called a tape. If you shook or dropped it, it would skip. Nowadays, if I want to randomise my MP3 playlist on this thing, I can just shake my phone and it mixes everything up without missing a beat.

I absolutely loved it even before I found out that dude, MY PHONE HAS THE SIMS ON IT. Okay, so it’s a lightweight and kind of lame version, but whatever: Sims! I has them! On my phone!

So anyway, despite new computers, new laptops and even new houses, as far as I’m concerned this is the best 30 quid I’ve spent in a long, long time. Sadly, our love affair so far as been torrid but all too brief: the phone refuses to charge. So tomorrow we’re going back to hopefully get that sorted, which is obviously critical.

Not because I’m desperate to take anyone’s calls, but because my Sims are waiting for me.

I’m pretty sure that the past four plus weeks will go down in my personal history as The Month That Shall Live in Infamy. Special highlights include:

• The kidney infection that was actually peritonitis;
• The dead workstation;
• The dead laptop;
• The lost mobile phone.

Now, I’m not normally one of those annoying PollyAnna “the glass is half full, clouds have silver linings!” people, but on the plus side:

• The list of dead things does not include me;
• New computer, woot!
• New laptop, woot!
• New mobile phone, woot!

Obviously, none of that stuff is free, but I can tell you that the new laptop I’m typing on is very shiny (literally - the screen is one of those reflective glass-like screens and it is cool), the new computer is both screamingly fast and gloriously stable, and the new phone that arrives tomorrow is very pink and has rhinestones.

These were all small cash outlays, however, compared to the kick in the ass purchase pending for May, namely a house. This has all been arranged at lightening-fast speed, and while we’re still waiting on the final loan approval, things look good; an offer was accepted, a deposit was paid, and hopefully it will all go well.

Everyone keeps telling me this is a marvellous way to spend several hundred thousand euros, and that few things in life can compare to the satisfaction of opening the door to your own home and knowing it is your door. I keep pointing out that when the door falls off the hinges and the roof caves in, it is still your door, but everyone seems happy to just gloss over that bit. Perhaps this is a secret conspiracy of the home owner cabal, sort of how new parents feel obligated to tell you that babies are absolutely marvellous and this is the best thing they’ve ever signed up to spend €20K a year on while getting 3 hours of sleep per night and secretly sobbing in the shower every day. But there you have it; we’re willingly joining the cabal and no doubt I’ll be telling you about how absolutely marvellous it all is in short order.

All I can say is that it’s a good thing that mortgage insurance premiums are not based on the luck of the insured. I’d never qualify.

Yesterday evening, just after the time at which my friendly neighbourhood GP closes up for the weekend, I started getting an occasional pain in my kidney, a pain which became progressively more sharp as time went on. You don’t have to be Marie Curie to know that this is either a kidney infection or a kidney stone, and you don’t have to be Albert Einstein to begin fervently praying for Door A: Infection.

Since “screaming in agony at 3 am” seemed like a sucktastic differential diagnosis method, I took myself off to SouthDoc. Last time I did this, they left me on the floor of their waiting room while my appendix ruptured and I departed in an ambulance; this time, I came home an hour and a half later with a barrel full of antibiotics and painkillers. Comparatively speaking, I think we can chalk that one up as a win.

24 hours later, I am delighted that this appears to definitively be an infection, because while I feel like complete shit, I am not screaming in agony whilst trying to piss an object just slightly wider than your average ureter. And for that I am very, very grateful.

I am also very, very weirded out. Most of my marriage is a battleground for possession of the thermostat; I run around barely clad in monkey pants and a vest, screaming like a menopausal hotflash harridan for my husband to turn the bloody heat down while he sits there fully dressed complaining that he’s cold.

At the moment, however, I am huddled in a miserable heap on the sofa, wearing a long sleeved shirt, a sweatshirt, a bathrobe and a sleeping bag, and I cannot get warm. Meanwhile my poor husband is sitting next to me in a t-shirt, basking in sub-Saharan heat and sweltering to death.

But he looks damn cute in the monkey pants.

Despite the fact that I am the antithesis of a brazen careerist - I don’t do corporate hierarchy, and I am goal, not money, motivated - I am a long time reader of Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist. There’s something refreshing about reading someone who is even bitchier and more acerbic than I am, and while I don’t always agree with her, I appreciate her willingness to continually put well-supported but unpopular views out there. Unpalatable doesn’t always mean wrong.

Often, she writes about women and work, a topic near and dear to my heart. Today she’s revealed that in the aftermath of her divorce, she’s hired a household manager to the tune of $50,000 a year. And before you start laughing, let me tell you: if I had it, I’d do it. And I don’t even have kids.

Of all of the sage advice my mother has ever given me, some of the smartest is “Every working woman needs a wife.” I hired a housekeeper about 10 years ago when I lived in a flat that was, quite literally, a shoebox. The loo was smaller than an airplane bathroom and the shower was in the kitchen. And despite the fact that I married a kick ass guy who does both all the grocery shopping and all the ironing, we still have a housekeeper.

There is a reason these wonderful women are referred to as “household help.” They help keep the household up and running, and more importantly (for me at least) they provide the reassurance of there being a human being out there who’s actual job it is to help you.

That’s worth a tremendous amount to me. When we have eaten out of the freezer because we’ve been utterly broke, we have paid the housekeeper. When we have not bought each other holiday gifts, we have paid the housekeeper. When we have not been able to pay the light bill, we have paid the housekeeper.

There’s a lot of talk about outsourcing these days, and a lot of people who do what I do who outsource pieces of work to other people and even other countries. I’m fine with that in theory, but I’m way too attached to what I produce to do that. So while I can’t outsource graphic design or HTML, I can outsource fridge cleaning and carpet hoovering.

To be honest, I’m jealous as hell of Penelope Trunk. Because I’ve got a housekeeper, but I really need a wife.

So as the weather turns a bit warmer and plans for summer firm up, it appears my husband is leaving me, again. This time it will be a week for the Glastonbury Festival and four weeks for the Edinburgh Festival. He booked his ticket for Glastonbury last night, at which point I told him to hand over his credit card because fair is fair and I too am getting the hell out of Dodge.

I have said this in advance of every summer for five years in a row. The mistake I have made up until now is trying to book a July holiday between his June and August commitments at a time we can both go away and to a destination we can both agree on. Every summer, we have completely failed to tick these boxes, and I have found myself facing a chilly September with not nearly enough air miles behind me.

This year I said “sod that for a game of soldiers” and let Aer Lingus have its pilfering way with me. Direct flights are a bit limited, but considering that I live in Cork, I’m delighted to have an airport at all and am not really going to start bitching that I can’t jet into Cannes on a whim. Of the available options, I have no interest in going to Berlin, I’ve already spent a lot of time in Rome, and I’d be happy to go to Spain again except the rest of you will already be there. So five minutes after demanding my husband hand over plastic liberty, I picked a destination very nearly at random and booked tickets to Prague.

I know absolutely nothing about Prague except that I’m staying at the Pension Museum. I assume this means there is a museum nearby, and that sounds nice because I enjoy museums, particularly when I have no idea what’s in them. I imagine there will also be coffee, books and whatever incarnation of Czech pastry passes for breakfast at noon.

I both love and like my other half but I have a deeply ingrained habit of traveling on my own. We are not the same person and we don’t have perfectly aligned tastes, and I have this suspicion that nothing will exhaust a marriage as much as 40 years of constant compromise. That just sounds hideously frustrating. So for five days in July, there will be museums, graveyards, bookstores, fabric and bead stores.

There will not, however, be tents, mud or any kind of portaloos.

My dad used to tell this joke. When you’d complain about one of those days when everything had gone wrong - you woke up, slipped on dog puke, fell down the stairs, broke your ankle, hopped to the kitchen, realised your phone has been cut off of and you couldn’t call an ambulance, tried to administer first aid in the bathroom, and then noticed you’d somehow managed to lock yourself in there, he’d say “Other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the theatre?”

While that is an old and very nearly completely true story, it is also pretty much what the last two weeks have been like. In other words, two weeks of miserable, epic Fail.

In all the incarnations of my blog I have been pretty much transparent. Were my archives online, which one day they will be, you could read about everything from heart break to politics to writing a sex advice column for a top shelf men’s mag to the fun ride that was a temporary psychotic break complete with my dead grandfather dropping in for a chat in my kitchen. You could, in short, read about the experiences of a woman in her mid-20s, which somehow fit into a different box of reality than a woman in her mid-30s.

Things are different now, and I’m not so transparent these days. Especially these days. Something happened, it was outside my control, I took the ride and I’m here to not tell the story. Sometimes, that’s just how it rolls, and I’ve decided today that that’s okay when it has to be.

I’m in the middle of returning all outstanding emails, and completed sites will begin to appear very shortly. I have a delightful pile of Xanax at my side, and frankly that and PhotoShop are enough to get me through the day and pending projects out the door.

Posts may be a bit light as I catch up, but we now return you to your regularly scheduled broadcast. Thank you for standing by.