Ooooh, there's one with fewer zeros!

So our friends Barb and Frank (pronounced "Frawnk" because he's all foreign-born and stuff) were here for three days to look for a house. They told me they were looking in a Reesonabul (Margie from Fargo) price range and we tried not to laugh aloud much while they were in the room.

When they said their agent found thirty listings, we remembered there have been a lot of meth lab evictions of late, and that corner with the prostitution busts on the nightly news might have some vacancies now that business has cooled somewhat.

But. They found a house. In fact, they found TWO they liked enough to haw and hem.

So tonight when I picked J up and his cold had him feeling Meh enough to skip the gym, we went for a little drive and collected real estate sheets. Two places in particular were fun- one pretty much out of our range unless we stop eating or start breaking laws and another we think must have had a murderer-rapist living there it's so comparatively cheap.

I think perhaps this here is the funnest part about house hunting: the initial thrill. Like Jr. High girls flipping through Bop magazine, we can look and idealize and dream. Plus drool- though Toby has done so much of that lately that J and I will just leave that department all up to him.

Eventually, looking at houses leads to Wanting houses. And to Mortgages (mort=death in french). And to J calculating and recalculating, his fingers ticking back and forth in the air while his eyes roll up in his head. Creepy, really. I prefer the 'We're just looking, thanks' stage.

And the Honda has cooperated with our new hobby how? By springing some sort of drool capability all its own, sputtering right on the feet of whoever is lucky enough to be in the front passenger seat when the A/C is running. I wonder how many minor yet expensive problems you can ignore on a marvel of Japanese engineering before it bites you in the a$$. No, really, we'll keep count and let you know when we find out!