Surviving the weekend

Sorry it's been a couple days since the last post. The weather's been beautiful, we've been outside, and I've been utterly spent at the end of every day. I don't think I've ever felt fatigue as intense as I have recently, trying to keep up with Augie while growing Queequeg. At least, now that we've changed the clocks (here in Sweden we just did it last night), Augie might start waking up at 6:30am instead of 5:30am. He's been sleeping solid from bedtime until morning, though I take issue with what he considers "morning." I'm sure I can find someone to back me up when I say that 5:30am is still the middle of the night!

Augie beholds the duck; the duck beholds Augie:

We came very close to buying an apartment last week, a beautiful turn-of-the-century two-bedroom in an area called Sundbyberg. Unfortunately, we couldn't get the mortgage pulled together in time. (We submitted our papers three weeks ago and were told it would take two weeks, and then when we made the second call to follow up on it, we found out our banker had gone on holiday without notifying us. Although I explained the urgency with which we needed an answer by Thursday night (the sellers wanted to accept an offer Thursday night and sign the papers on Friday morning), our new banker didn't bother calling until Friday afternoon.)

Buying/selling a house or apartment happens so quickly that there's really no time for hesitating. A place shows on Sunday and then usually Monday evening again, bids start coming in Monday or Tuesday, and the place is usually sold by Thursday. As you can guess, this doesn't leave much opportunity to comparison shop, or to nag your banker to get your pre-approval finalized.

We saw some places today but nothing that grabbed us; we'll try to see one or two more tomorrow, and if it doesn't work out, I don't know what we'll do.