I have been buying a house in Canada since early April. I say "since early April" because of course once your offer is accepted you start going around telling the world that you've bought a house, when in fact you have not actually done any of the house buying work yet. I'm not going to believe the house is bought until I have slept in it and the cops fail to show up to arrest me for home invasion.

I have to sign things every day, and my current task is a 24 page behemoth that needs to be signed in triplicate, witnessed by a lawyer, and then faxed *and* couriered to Vancouver, where my new house is located. The signing must then be repeated by my partner on the other end.

We had a going away party one Friday night in May (we are optimists, it's true, to think we might actually succeed in this process and be allowed *move*). At 9pm my real estate agent called from Vancouver to say we had to sign some documents that very instant. We were tipsy and surrounded by 50 of our closest, drunkest friends, without a fax machine or a designated driver in sight. Our neighbours let us stumble over to their place to avail ourselves clumsily of their fax -- three times, since our celebratory brains no longer understood how to operate simple machinery. The next day, it turned out they would not be needed those documents for another week. Naturally.