Sydney, I love you but you're bringing me down

from here

I like living in Carlton. I like the fact that walking for five minutes or less gets me to a gym, a train station, two medical centres, a post office, a petrol station, a hairdresser, a much-loved park, a tattoo/waxing parlour, a mini supermarket, and a takeaway shop that sells a BBQ pork chow mein so delicious that I’m never disappointed when we get to 5pm and realise we have no food to eat for dinner.

I like it so much that I’d started thinking, “Why did we want to leave Sydney? I like Sydney! Maybe we could stay! Maybe our kids could be Sydney kids!” Our neighbour downstairs had mentioned that he might be selling his place soon, and he suggested we buy it so we could have three bedrooms instead of two. “How cool would that be?!” I’d thought. “We’d only have to move our furniture downstairs! We’d already know the neighbours and the area! We’d have a garage we could actually maneouvre our car into! And yes, property in Sydney is ridiculously expensive, but if we settle for an apartment rather than a house and don’t spend any money on anything else ever, it’ll be totally doable!” I daydreamed about the idea for a while, getting more puffed up with excitement each time I thought about it. And then I jumped online to check out prices of places in this area and promptly deflated.

Whoa. WHOA. W. H. O. A.

We’ve started daydreaming about Adelaide instead.

If everything went according to plan, we’d move down there by the end of next year (Moses starts school in 2016) and we’d rent for a bit while we searched for somewhere to buy, and then we’d buy a place, move once more, and then NEVER MOVE AGAIN EVER FOR THE REST OF OUR WHOLE ENTIRE LIVES. 

To stay sane at the moment, I’m pretending that things for us generally do go according to plan, and that this is probably exactly the way it’ll turn out.