Got a house! Hurrah and hooray. Thank the deities of patience and luck. After demoralizing rejections all over Carlton, Fitzroy and Brunswick, we widened our search in desperation and struck gold in East Melbourne. Second most expensive suburb in Melbourne after Toorak makes it easy for poor students to omit from their scouring of real estate websites. Luckily for us, desperation paid off. A freakin' huge, six bedrooms (probably seven with a bit o' rejigging), a crawl home from the city, a reasonable bike ride to uni. Did I mention the size? It's huge, imposing on the street with two craggy storeys of red brick, before relenting inside and giving way to lovely polished wooden floors, high ceilings, massive rooms and two toilets next to each other, labelled Male and Female. Yes, it used to be a medical consulting centre, which may explain the lack of interest apart from us - think of all the sick people flowing through the place, think of the sinks in nearly every room used to expel microbes - but it's ours for a year, and we love it. O, the excitement. It's probably obvious that this is my first time out of the family home, which is a little sad for a twenty-two year old but there are extenuating circumstances (not for the net's eyes n ears though). Bring on the learning curve; bring on independence, pauperhood, laughter, tears and sweep me up in the grand narrative of the city, far from the quiet doldrums of Eltham. Mm. Perhaps a little excessive, that last outburst, but hopefully excusable.