So it seems we are on the "we're moving to Portland train" . . . again. Tomorrow morning we will rush down to look at houses together. Today we are poring over maps of neighborhoods, squinting at Google aerial views, wandering through strange wide-angle photos of interiors shot as if all the rooms are 1,000 feet long and slanted inwards like an LSD dream. Unfortunately the house with the secret bathroom hidden behind a bookshelf-door is located next to an interstate on-ramp, though I'm not too sorry that the one that appears to be furnished entirely with guitars and skateboards has already been sold. And when will Tom stop hoping that the cheapest, ugliest, dirtiest houses will turn out to be gems? Ugh.

Anyway, we're both slightly optimistic about one of the places we'll be looking at--enough so that I've been figuring out how long it will take us to walk to the beach from the house (16 minutes) and how easy it might be to remove the old-lady yew hedges from the yard (not very). I've also started thinking about the implications of the street name. We seem to have a predilection for the last names of British war-hero statesmen.