I have just sat at this computer for thirty minutes while the kids were all upstairs, and do you know what I did?

I looked at houses for sale in upstate New York. Had any of them changed since the last time? Had any new ones been added?

Well, one. I did find one new one. A pretty interesting one, in fact: a 150 year old Federal style on 11.76 acres. Five bedrooms. Pictures of the inside, so you know that it's not about to be condemned. A cozy yellow kitchen, a parlor with old-fashioned rose wallpaper, a barn, and a view of the valley spread out down below.

And more money than we wanted to pay. I used the site's mortgage calculator and it says that the bank is probably willing to give us a very long rope and direct us to a tree where we can proceed to hang ourselves with it, but I had rather be a little more restrained.

Anyway, the house is probably on a highway. When we went up for our visit last month, we had a sheaf of information sheets we'd printed out from the realty sites. We spent some time driving around trying to find them on our own. I tossed a lot of the sheets down onto the floorboards. Apparently no one sells a house up there unless it's right on a highway.

(Background noise: The kids are watching Godzilla cartoons in the family room, right next to me. "Godzilla! Godzilla, wake up!" I hear. "You can't let those space monkeys beat you!" Now wouldn't it be nice to watch Godzilla battle space monkeys in a parlor papered with old-fashioned rose wallpaper?)