Adventures in real estate

Today our Melbourne restoration project went up on a design blog!  Here’s the back story of how we ended up getting the house in the first place. The renovations? A whole other story for another day.

Marc and I are not real estate neophytes. We have bought and sold houses in three countries. I know the sellers’ tricks and the buyers’ tactics. We were flush with cash from selling our Vancouver townhouse and ready to embark upon yet another real estate adventure on a new continent, in a new city. Our stuff was sitting in a storage facility, and we were living out of suitcases. We needed to settle down.

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Race Report: Two Bays Trail Run

About a year ago in an attempt to make some connections in Melbourne, I joined the Crosbie Crew, a horde of enthusiastic runners led by a guy named Tim Crosbie. A bunch of them had just finished an epic trail run and for the first couple of weeks, that was all they talked about. The Two Bays. I felt like I had missed out on the run of the century. It also seemed kind of crazy, to do a long trail run like that in the middle of the hot Australian summer. Continue reading

Dispatch from Down Under

Facebook greeted me with this today:

Your friends haven’t heard from you in a while. Time to write a blog post.

Ouch. No arguing with that, is there? Welcome to the era of cyber-motivation.

My blogging apparatus is rusty in the extreme — hopefully my brain is still firing on all cylinders. I put the laptop on the glass-and-wicker table in the apartment we’re renting on the 16th floor of a downtown Melbourne high-rise, crack my knuckles and stretch out my arms. Continue reading