Do We Stay. Or Do We Go?

A couple of weeks ago I was standing in our minute living room and could smell the unmistakeable stench of dead possum.

Given I am a country girl, I can identify the stench of dead animals at 10 paces. My parents taught me well. I know dead possum when I sniff it. And dead fox. And dead dog poo.

This was that gassy smelly of a dead possum. A common dead possum. In our ceiling.

So I called our real estate agent to report the dead animal and request some back-up. She called back and told me the landlord would come over the next day.

Great. Dead possum be gone.

So the next day the landlord came over. I expected him to sniff around the house. Smell gassy dead possum and remove dead possum.

Instead he said: "I have a possum cage, shall I set it?"

Well, not unless you're Bill Murray from Ghostbusters, I don't think you're going to trap this dead possum. I can't imagine it's hungry for anything.

And me being the pushover went, "Oh, oh, ok, yep." And let him set the trap and leave.

Now let's time warp ourselves to today. The now. The right now. And right now, we've got disgusting, and I am talking deee-skust-ing big. Fat. Blowflies. Flying in from the airvent thingie. Seriously. One day they were just loitering there, at the air-vent thingie, and flying in and out. Filth.

Now fast forward to right this very second, and I've just checked my emails and surprise! I've received an email from my real estate agent, my very favourite pen-pal!

Did I receive their correspondence back in March? No. No. No I did not. Well surprise! We've reached our 1 year anniversary, and to celebrate they're putting our rent up. Who wants to blow out the candles on that one?

Now I'm not Bill Gates. Or Steve Jobs. Or even Brynne Edelstein. So where am I going to pull this extra cash out of? Tell me that real estate agent? Selling blow-flies on the backstreets? Hocking possum skins to NZ fashion designers?

What to do? Cough up? Or look for an alternative abode?