Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

cattitude and I looked over the draft lease, and then I emailed the realtor with a couple of issues, and a bunch of questions: "I don't like this clause about possible rent increases, with blank lines in it" is an issue, and "how will we handle snow removal?" is a question. She emailed the realtor, and then called me with satisfactory answers to our questions (including that the clause we don't like won't be in the final lease).

So, cattitude went over to her office and gave her checks for (a) the security deposit, (b) first and last months' rent, and (c) the pet deposit. We should be getting the actual lease tonight or tomorrow morning, to be signed electronically using Docusign, and then we can relax for a little while before thinking about exactly when we want to move.

We have the current (Somerville) apartment through the end of July, and the lease on the new place in Belmont starts July 1, so we have some flexibility. I have an editorial project with a July 5 deadline, so the second or even third week in July would probably work better for having everything packed up, and taking ourselves and the cats over to the new place.

Also, after several days of sore left hip and knee, I was feeling enough better yesterday to go down to Davis with cattitude to do some shopping, and that went well enough that I went shoe shopping today and walked about a mile, including walking around the Copley Square farmers market and stopping for lunch and then to buy a cheesecake. (My phone says "1.4," but its "miles" are closer to kilometers.)

Tomorrow I hope to sleep late (having been up since about 5:30 a.m. today), get some editing done, and take things easy physically.

We've been emailing with a real estate agent, and he showed us two places this morning. One is a maybe—smaller than we'd really like, and more stairs than we want, but it's right here near Lake Street and we like the way the living room flows into the kitchen. The other is a no, for both size and a faint smell of mildew.

I emailed a different agent about a possible apartment yesterday; he has sent me a few questions, which I answered, and we will see if anything comes of it. There's also an appealing one that appears to be for rent by the owner, but I haven't heard back from her yet.

After looking at those two apartments, we had lunch, came home, and I decided to take a look at the garden. I picked one diva cucumber, a little small but it looked like it might be ready and came off the plant easily. That'll be part of dinner, if I can wait that long (and if it's actually ripe).