On Sunday we went to visit a property we had seen that looked really nice and we felt we had to take a look. Just in case it was our dream home – well you never know! The grounds were fantastic with stunning trees and manicured gardens with lots of plants. Much of the property was wooded and we wandered around and stood chatting to the owner and our realtor for quite a while outside.

It wasn’t until I woke up the following day that I realized I had been bitten – big time. My feet had lots of bites and I was starting to get some hives develop. Also my eye was a bit gritty. Hubby also had some bites – nothing unusual for him, but very unusual for me.

Later in the day my eye really started to get red and sore and started weeping. I wear contact lenses and had to remove the one eye because it was getting so bad. Along with my feet itching like crazy I was feeling really crappy.

By evening I could barely see out of my eye and it was so sensitive to light I had to wear sunglasses in the house and put no lights on in the evening.

When I woke up the following morning my eye was caked in horrid stuff and I had to soak it before I could open it. It was still very red and swollen and very sore. I put some drop in that we had and hoped for the best. Luckily as the day wore on my eye got a little better and I was able to replace my contact lens so I could at least see. By evening I could see and it wasn’t too bad, just still a bit sensitive to light.

Today it is better still with much of the redness gone and it doesn’t feel so gritty. Still a bit light sensitive, but not nearly as bad as before. My feet are still sending my crazy with itching though – as are hubby’s.

Needless to say we will not be putting in a offer on the property as we are both clearly allergic to it!!!!

Well, we sat there and sat there and no realtor. Then a woman came out of the house dressed in her nightclothes and said that she had not made an appointment with her realtor and that her and her husband worked nights and they were still in bed. She told us in no uncertain terms we were not welcome, so we drove off.

I phoned our realtor but couldn’t get an answer so left a message saying we had been sent away from the house and we would make our way to the second.

When we got to the second there was no sign of the realtor. We drove around and decided we were not interested in this one anyway, so decided we had had enough and would go home. On the way back down the main road we passed the realtor. We both stopped and she came over to say there had been a mix up and the seller’s realtor had not booked the appointment properly. We were really annoyed as we had wasted the day going there, driven 350 km round trip and spent money on gas (petrol).

Apparently there is an open house there this weekend, but we now have to decide if we want to travel all that way to see this one property. Trouble was it looked ideal from the outside, it’s the right price and the internal pics look nice too. Dilemma!

Is it fate that we couldn’t get in? Is this a way of telling us to stop looking, or is it fate that we really liked the look of it and we should go back for the open house?

I guess I’ll keep you posted when we decide.

The realtor we are using in the 1000 Islands area sent us details of a couple of properties she thought we would like and so we are going to see them, probably tomorrow.

We thought we had pretty much stopped looking to move this side of winter, but the houses look very promising, so we are going to take a look. If they are not suitable, at least it will be a day out for us!

Today we are off to Presquile Provincial Park which is nearby in Brighton, just to the west of Belleville. So will report back on that later.

We then found the perfect plot, totally perfect, but the house was not so perfect, but workable. We went home to think about things then decided, yes we would buy it, so went back for another look. This just shows how important second viewings are. We took off our rose-tinted glasses – well Chris did and found that the heat pump would need replacing soon and the wiring was old and not to code, so would need replacing. He also found a few more things that would need doing so this made up our minds and we decided not to make an offer on it.

We really want a reasonable size house, open plan on a good size private plot. Later that day we drove past a house that was set in a couple of acres, shielded from a not very busy road, lots of trees, great views of woodland, wildlife galore and a pretty good house – lo and behold, it is our house! Perhaps we already own the house we are looking for, but needed to see others in order to drive this fact home.

So, we have decided to call off the house hunt for now and maybe consider it again in the spring when the market picks up after winter. I bet I will still be taking a peek at the property papers though – just in case!

We must have really liked the plot because we kept trying to bring ourselves round to liking the house even more than we really did, but I am sure we would have regretted buying it in a few months. Still, it is the closest we have come to seriously considering buying somewhere else.

The weather here has been brilliant for the last few months. We have had the odd days with rain and a few cloudy days, but on the whole it has been sun and high 20’s temps all the way. Some days it has gone well into the 30’s which for me is far too hot. If you add the humidex onto that some days it has been in the 40’s – my delicate pale skin cannot take it!!

The other day we had to take the truck into Ford as we had a slow puncture. They found the nail but it was not repairable, so we had to have a new tire. When we took it in we were told it would be about half an hour, so we decided to wait. However one hour and forty minuets later it finally was complete. We were also told it would cost around $300 including tax and the service they also did the previous week, but the bill was actually a little over $350. Then to add insult to injury, the woman serving us said “you don’t seem to have caught the sun much” So, now not only had we had to wait forever and pay over the odds, but now I was lily white too….cheek.

The second house was brand new and on six acres of land which was great, but needed intensive landscaping (it was pretty much a field). From the outside we thought the house would be worth the trouble of the landscaping, but once again we were disappointed once we got inside. The house was much smaller than it appeared from the outside, a bit like the TARDIS in reverse! So, we are back to the thought of putting the whole house moving idea on hold.

Anyway, onto another reoccurring topic – my insides! Yesterday I had my MRI done in Kingston. I had never had an MRI done before and had only really seen them on House (TV show) so knew very little about them.

When I was called in I was asked a lot of questions such as medical history, operations, allergies etc. I was also asked if I had any metal in my body or had any piercings (all jewellery ahs to be removed). Had I ever worked with metal or did I wear coloured contact lenses? Did I have any medical or smoking patches on my skin and many other bazaar questions?

I was then told they would need to inject a dye into me, which I needed to give permission for. I was just about to say, “yeah fine” when she told me that the dye could sometimes cause an allergic reaction such as rash or anaphylactic shock and death. She stressed the changes of the two latter options was very low and they had doctors on hand if the worst happened! So, completely reassured – NOT, I agreed.

I had to change into a gown and was told to lie on a table and had a strange contraption laid across my abdomen. I was then moved into the machine which was very closed in and had little room, so I have no idea how they MRI larger people? I was given headphones and it began.

You feel absolutely nothing but the noise is quite deafening even with headphones on. It is like you are in a metal cylinder and half a dozen people are on the outside banging and scraping the sides. Through the headphones they started to play panpipes music, which I hate. I did debate asking them to turn off the music as I preferred to hear the banging, scraping and beeping etc. There is also cool air blowing all round you, which I found really annoying as I hate draughts.

After about half an hour they pulled me out again and injected the dye into my arm, then put me back in the machine for a few more minutes. I suppose in total I was in there fore about forty minutes.

When it was complete they told me to dress (fortunately the dye had no ill-effects) and told me to wait in the waiting room. After about five minutes I was given a CD with my scans on it.

I now have to wait for the gynaecologist to contact me for another appointment once he has analysed the results. Hopefully he will also have the results of my ultrasound from last week, as I haven’t heard anything about that yet.

We had our house valued by a three agents and all came up with the same price, so it must be about right. We are very pleased as the price is actually more than we thought, which is always a bonus. It seems that the work we have put into the house, especially the basement being almost finished and the granite in the kitchen has paid off. One of the agents who came round was originally from Scotland and another from Germany, so us immigrants get everywhere!

We spent Friday night on the computer looking for possible houses to buy. Because we are not tied down to one area we ended up looking at places as far west as Port Hope/Rice Lake to Prescott to the east. We spent hours driving round all the properties and viewing them from the outside to see if we wanted to progress to viewing the inside.

This is a definite bonus of actually living here. When we came in April last year to view houses before landing, we had an endless list of properties, all of which our fantastic realtor booked us in to see. Many of which we knew were wrong as soon as we saw them from the outside. Now we are here we can drive around at our leisure and know instantly if we like it or not from the outside. This cuts out lots of wasted time on our part and the realtors.

One house we saw from the outside and liked turned out to be absolutely enormous on the inside. The land was great as it was four acres and lots of it woodland, so that was great, but the interior of the house would have needed major modernising and quite a bit of money spending on it. It was so huge that if I had started cleaning it, I think I would just about have finished it before needing to start all over again. The owners of the house were also from the UK and had moved to Canada fifty years ago. We had a lovely chat with them, so not all was wasted.

By the end of Monday night we had spend three days driving literally hundreds of km in search of a house and fund none that we felt good enough about to take further. Today I phoned the realtor who we will use to sell with to explain that we dare not put our house on the market for fear of not finding a suitable house to buy.

She said that we are now approaching the slower time in real estate in Canada and we might be better to wait until the spring when the market picks up. People here tend to put houses on the market in the spring after the snows giving then time to sell and buy during the summer holidays. This way then end up moving during the kids holidays and the kids can start new schools etc if needed in September.

We will keep our eyes open, but have put moving on a semi-backburner for now.

All our animals are still keeping us entertained. Thanks for the comments about them all and the warnings of us getting too friendly with them, we just can’t help it though.

Our very bold chipmunk is now quite happy to sit with us on the front step and we no longer have to feed him at arms length. He just comes right up to us and is not bothered at all. Several other chips are getting closer, but won’t quite take from our hands yet.

We are waiting to see chipmunk and squirrel babies, which apparently will be coming out soon. We may have already seen some, but we are not sure how much smaller they are from the adults, so it is hard to say.

Most of the grackle babies have now gone their own way, as are the blue jays. We have one lovely baby cardinal who eats at our place most days. He is a pink colour as his red colour will develop over time.

On Tuesday we went to see the house we had found on MLS. It had the most fantastic views across the St Lawrence River and the islands near the 1000 Islands area of Ontario. However the house itself was pretty tired looking and would need a lot of work to bring it up to anything like what we already have. It was half the size of our current house, which is not too much of a problem as our house is huge, but the general condition let it down. It would have needed new windows, floors, kitchen, bathrooms etc. So in the end we decided against it even though the price was pretty good and we could have done it up and made money on it. The trouble was it needed a lot spending on it before you could see a return and of course that is only if you then sold it.

We will keep looking just to see what is about and if we find somewhere else, then we can look again.

This morning we had one company come round to value our house. They seemed very impressed and kept saying “wow” as they went around. Not sure if this was genuine, or just one of their gimmicks. They said that they had looked at comparables in the area but after looking round the house ours was better than many others so they would have to go away and look into it some more. They are coming back tomorrow afternoon.

We have another company coming tomorrow morning and a third on Saturday morning, so we will have to wait and see what they all say. Until we know what we can get for our house we cannot commit to buying anything, not that we have found anything yet.

Our chipmunk is so tame now that if we open the front door or the garage door his comes overt to greet us. Today when I opened the door to the realtor, she stood there looking petrified as Chip was happily dancing round her feet. I explained that he was tame and only looking for food, but she didn’t seem convinced!

We are also getting our house valued at the end of the week. We have two companies coming round. Obviously the value of this house will determine if we move or not as you have to pay quite a lot more over hear for selling costs. With realtors, as a buyer you pay them nothing, but a seller has to pay around 7% of the selling price, so this can be quite a lot of money and will obviously eat into our equity.

Also, I had my second ultrasound for my cyst today. The woman doing the scan told me I would get a phone call from a doctor to give me the results. I believe the cyst has gone because I have no pain anymore and she told me before that it was this that was causing me pain and not the double womb or the fibroids. Hope to hear back about that soon and an appointment for my MRI.

We are also starting to wonder if we should move again. When we purchased our house, we did so on a two week trip a few months before we landed and although the house has pretty much everything we wanted, we also know that our perfect house is still out there. So, don’t be surprised if sometime in the future I announce that we are moving.

We have looked at a few properties over the last couple of weeks (only from the outside) and have ruled most out, however yesterday we saw a house which on paper (or MLS) looks great and perfect for us, but we will have to actually view it to see if it lives up to expectations.

In one way we want to view it, but are also afraid that we will love it and that will start off a whole chain of events that I’m not sure we are ready for. So, watch this space!

Over the last few weeks we have been trying to get some of our wildlife eating from our hands and we have succeeded with the chipmunks. We sit outside for an hour most days with a pile of monkey nuts feeding the chipmunks.

At first they were taking them at arms length, then running off a few feet to open and eat (or rather store in their mouths) them. Now they just come over and take the nut and sit by our sides eating.

The other day when Chris went to the mailbox to get the mail one of the chips followed him and he nearly trod on him. Also, on Saturday he was doing some weeding in the garden and the chips were following him about waiting to be fed. He ended up carrying a bag of nuts around with him so he could feed as he weeded.

Last night we had the thunderstorm from hell. We went to bed at about 11pm and the skies were rumbling gently in the background, but within half an hour the thunder was crashing down with lightening so bright and frequent it was like midday not midnight. The rain coming down was torrential and the storm continued till about 4am. We could not sleep with the noise and they forecast more today and tonight.

I am off to the hospital today for another ultrasound, so hopefully my cyst has gone and I then just have to wait for the MRI appointment for the other things that are amiss with my insides!