What's been happening...

• I'm relieved to say that I've finally made some progress health-wise, and am feeling a lot more positive that things are moving in the right direction. I've had tons of pain in my left leg and also down the left side of my back and ribcage, which became pretty swollen. Despite three 8 hour round-trip visits to my doctor in OUE City over the past couple of weeks (and, geez, travelling that far with back pain is so not fun), she really didn't offer any advice or possible explanation. She just told me to take pain medication and see how things were in a few weeks. Great. I understand that my doctor thinks that a lot of my physical symptoms are just lingering niggles from the past couple of years which will disappear as I gradually get better, but honestly, pain that stops you from sitting, laying down and walking normally can't be good, right?
• And so, I decided to go see my osteopath. He'd been amazing in the past when I had neck/shoulder trouble, but I really thought that the pain I'm suffering from now was not bone/muscle related, but something that he wouldn't be able to help with. I was nervous about the appointment, not because I'd be pulled and prodded about, but because I was worried that he couldn't help and I'd be no nearer to getting better. Fortunately, that didn't happen. He immediately (and literally) put his finger on the problem. I apparently have two ribs that are partly trapped and my pelvis and lower back are not properly aligned right now. Sounds horrid, but I'm just so glad to finally know what's wrong. I'll need a series of appointments to get things back in place, but I can already feel things freeing up a little. Yay for my osteopath...he's my hero of the week!
• If I can have an inanimate hero of the week, it has to be this. I'm totally in love with my fleecy microwavable wheat bag. Actually, I have 2 small ones, plus the larger hot-water bottle shaped one. They definitely helped ease my discomfort this week, and I know that they'll also be great to snuggle with when I have cramps or just need something warming in winter. They're awesome and smell wonderful too (the small ones are citrus and eucalyptus and the larger one is lavender)...I'm definintely going to be buying some for Christmas gifts.
• I also started back with therapy the week before last. It had been quite a long break, as the OUE Therapy Service only opens during term time, so I hadn't been since late June. I was a little reticent about going back again, as I'd been working through quite a few tough issues before the summer break, and there was part of me that just wanted to put off dealing with it all again. But I did go, and I'm glad I did. I've had the same therapist for nearly two years, and although it's now a long journey to see her, I don't think I'm ready to stop therapy yet or to see a different therapist nearer to home. Actually, I find the journey home very helpful as it gives me the space to go over the session in my own mind. There are definitely some things that I've been talking about in therapy that I want to blog about, but I need to get my thoughts clearer first.
• What else? Oh yes, your very favourite Pink Cupcake blogging topic...my impending move. Well, it's all gone to hell in a handbasket. To cut a very long saga short, we won't be moving anywhere anytime soon and I couldn't be more p*ssed off about it. There are some major legal problems with Dream Flat, which our oh-so-unobservant lawyers didn't even notice. Were it not for LLH and some of his colleagues in the Commercial department, we'd probably still be completely unaware of all of these difficulties which are so bad as to make the property unmortgageable right now. Sorting all of this out is potentially very complex and costly, and may not even be possible, but after much hand-wringing we decided to go for it and try to resolve the problems. However, as we wouldn't be able to move into the flat next week as planned, our most immediate problem was that we'd soon be homeless. Fortunately, my Mum said we could stay with her (which has its own issues - it's not easy to stay with someone who has lived alone for 12 years and who has a completely perfect house with not one thing out of place, but that's another story), and I began to arrange storage.
• I wasn' t happy about any of this, especially as I still wouldn't have a permanent base and somewhere to finally unpack all of my research, but we resigned ourselves to the fact that at least we'd sold our house. Houses aren't selling particularly quickly around here right now, so homeless or not, Dream Flat or not, at least we weren't still going through the house-selling nightmare. Or so we thought...
• Our perfect house-buyers (first-timers with no property to sell and a pre-approved mortgage loan) who were all but ready to exchange contracts are no longer able to proceed. One of them has lost her job and they now can't get the mortgage. They may be able to sort things out if she finds another suitably stable job, but who knows how long that could take. I just can't believe the entire catalogue of disasters that our (non) move has been. And now we're back where we started from in June. It looks like I'll be calling real estage agents again on Monday and starting the endless cycle of cleaning and fretting. Not sure I can face it, but there's no other option. Plus, with the slowness of the property market here right now, it's very unlikely that we'll be able to buy Dream Flat, even if we sort out the legal problems. *sigh*. Okay, so I didn't manage to cut the long house saga very short, but I honestly could have gone on much longer, and did need to get it off my chest. It's really made me a grumpy cupcake. :(
• Not wanting to end this long post with doom and gloom, here's a few positive things that have happened too...
• I had my bi-annual eye test and apparently my eyesight has improved! I didn't even know it could improve. I'd always thought that it only deteriorated with age, but apparently not. My sight was pretty good anyway, but my optician recommended that I wear my glasses even less...yay! Although I do think they make me look more intelligent and studious. ;)
• I caught up with one of my best friends in OUE City. As I don't really see many people since I've been living back in Sleepy Boring Village, I'd forgotten how much I just enjoyed hanging out for coffee with my grad school friends. It was fun to have a really good conversation about all sorts of important and unimportant stuff (which I haven't really done with anyone but LLH for ages).
• To compensate for the fact that it will be a bit longer before we get our own cat, LLH bought me this. I love its sparkly eyes.
• I've been reading The Return of the Timewaster Letters. I'm not sure that it's quite as funny as The Timewaster Letters, but it's still very good and well worth a chunk of anyone's procrastination time. Be wary of reading it in public though, it's the kind of thing that makes you spontaneously laugh out loud.
• Oh, and I got the Sixth Season of the West Wing on DVD. Woo hoo! I think it's possibly moving from idealistic to fantastical in parts, but whatever, LLH and I both love it. We're already up to episode 15 out of 22. No prizes for how I'll be spending my Saturday evening...

Hope you're all having a great weekend, and thanks, as ever, for of the supportive comments you've left recently, they really did mean a lot to me. :)