the hunt begins

Number crunching makes my head explode.

I've fiddled my budget around in preparation for my new Find-a-Better-Place-to-Live project, and I'm going tonight to take a look at a house belonging to a friend of Boss-Lady's, which said friend is putting up for rent.

I only hope, fervently, that the connections will cause her to feel generous with the rent -- I talked to her today, and she hasn't decided on a number yet.

So this evening I will sally forth armed with my budget sheet, my winning smile, my disarming openness and all the forces my charisma can summon, and hope for a pleasant miracle.

If that doesn't work, I have a list of apartments taken from the classifieds on which to begin. Redoing my budget was great in that I realized fully the amount of money I'm hemorrhaging on where I'm living now. Cue horror and rage.

Oo, and if this house works out, she's remodeling it quite a bit at the moment, and there are promises, not only of laundry (which I haven't had in-house in three years) but of opportunities for me to help her pick the colors for some of the rooms. Cue potential squeals of giddy delight.

And if it doesn't work out, well, I have other things on which to focus. At the moment one of my primary sources of satisfaction comes from the flecks of primer and green paint decorating my person (hands, toes, forehead, collarbones, and, yesterday, eyebrows) from my latest ongoing project. At long last, I have paint clothes, scuzzy and stained, and the joy of getting utterly and messily engrossed in something that will turn out to be, if not pretty, at least exceptionally cool.