Today is Holly's first day at her new job, which is heading up a licensing group at biotech giant Amgen. Congratulations to Holly!

The job is located in Thousand Oaks, which is too far from Manhattan Beach to commute every day, so we will very likely be moving to Pacific Palisades, an area that is just north of Santa Monica.

The job is really a fantastic opportunity; it should put Holly's legal and scientific background to good use. The only big downside is the move, and neither of us wants to leave Manhattan Beach or our great friends there.

We have been spending a lot of time looking at open houses lately, and we saw a house yesterday that was so unusual that it deserves special mention...it's not for us, but I have never seen anything like it.

It's in a gated enclave called "Palisades Country Estates," which is a bit of a creative description because the homes are neither in the country nor are they estates (but one out of three ain't bad). Sometimes homeowners don't want the general public traipsing through their house, so they forego open houses and have their listing agent show their property by appointment only, which was the case yesterday.

The house was designed to look fairly normal from the outside and looks fairly normal from the inside at first blush. Perhaps decorated a bit eccentrically (for example, there was an extremely well-appointed office with high-end wood paneling on the walls and ceiling, but all of the wood was tinted dark blue).

But on closer inspection, the house is revealed to be a fortress of sorts. The original owner of this house, according to neighborhood lore, was an arms dealer. That owner sold to a "normal" family, who is now selling the house after living in it for a few years.

The first interesting feature was a large commercial safe hidden behind a swing-out bookshelf in the study; the bookshelf appears to be normal and attached to the wall, until you press it in the right place and it swings out to reveal the safe. The safe was obviously not for an individual person's jewelry and important documents.

On the other side of the house, there is keypad into which you type a pass code to access a hidden hi-tech walk-in closet. Once you enter the correct code (the real estate agent took a couple tries) a door opened to reveal a corridor with a spiral staircase at the end. At the top of the staircase was an absurdly well-appointed walk-in closet, but with the shelves and drawers not quite being the type and variety you would normally expect in a closet. It had been modified to make it work for storing clothes; something else besides clothes had clearly been stored there originally.

The garage was next, which was a three-abreast deal with the most finished look I have ever seen. Black lights, black walls, and crazy extra features like a roll-up door on the far side of the wall so you can park your limo in the garage. Black tile on the floor.

But all that was just a teaser for the piece de resistance (sorry I can't put the accent marks on that), which was a large office that was well-hidden above the garage, and had the floor area roughly of the three car garage below.

The access to this office was something else. There was a hydraulic sliding door that looks like a normal interior house wall on the house side, but when the wall slides away to reveal the entrance to the office, you can see that the sliding door (that you thought was the house wall) is solid and about six inches thick...and although I am no materials expert, it appeared to be made of steel and various composites that, as they say, "cannot be comprised balistically." The door looked like it was designed to stop an RPG.

Once you get past that door, there is a still-working retina scanner, (I am not kidding!) that gives you access to the office. The office was set up a bit like a trading floor at a small investment firm; picture a large "T" shaped desk where people can sit on all sides. This one desk probably could probably accommodate about seven people.

One leg of the "T" was raised on a platform, and everything in the room was black and silver and shiny and 80's looking. The listing agent told us the current owners (now selling the house) said the former owners (the purported arms dealers) left in a hurry, and one of the drawers in this office contained a very large amount of cash. Didn't say how much.

And finally, rumor has it that there is an un-permitted "panic room" under the tennis court in the backyard, but the current owners are mum about that...the rumor is that the original owner just never told the current owners how to access it.

Okay, lunch is over. Back to work.