We put an offer in on the house we like last week and it was accepted. On Thursday we applied for a mortgage and set the solicitor/surveyor wheels in motion. It's a big undertaking and a scary one too. Apparently it takes an average of 6-8 weeks to get from the mortgage application stage to the point where you can sign a bit of paper and get your hands on the deeds (most of which seems to consist of expensive solicitors taking their own sweet time). Despite our offer being accepted and a "sold" sign appearing on the property there is always the danger that they could try to raise the price on us at a later stage. They call it gazumping, but that seems far too cheery a word for something that is actually a fairly nasty thing to do.

Pity the poor fool who would risk my wrath...

Anyway, let's pretend the glass is half full: a fun part of buying your first house is trying to surreptitiously scrounge unwanted possessions from family and friends to use as a temporary measure until you can replace them. So far we have promises of bookshelves, a desk, beds, a side table, wardrobes, CD shelves, someone who will install phone lines/electrical sockets for free, someone who will install a fire for free... this is in addition to the stuff we have between us anyway of course.

In slightly more GD related shenanigans, my recent April fools gag is now listed on Wikipedia and in reply to Vampyre_Dark's probing/cheeky question I described what the News Editors do on a typical day.

Finally, I can't wait until I've got the website upgrade and the house hunting out of the way and I can get down to some serious game devving. It has been such a long time since I actually got a decent amount of code written. With this in mind, I'm trying to decide what exactly I should do. I'm currently an IT Analyst at work, with C++ knowledge from my spare time. There is a development team at work who are currently moving from VB to C#. So if I could get some knowledge of C# under my belt I'd be in a good position to get into the development side of things. Always thinking, see [wink]

Maybe some kind of C#/DirectX tomfoolery? Onwards and upwards!