People really live this way

The other day, Mr. H and I hit on a brilliant plan for cheap entertainment: attending real estate open houses. It’s fall, and these things are on every corner, not unlike dead squirrels. Sure, if we see a really spanky place, we might buy it. That is the endgame of this harebrained scheme. But it’s really about the thrill of the hunt. You can’t beat whiling away a Sunday afternoon by poking your nose in other people’s closets: we saw His n’ Hers Nascar apparel.

Apparently any ol’ body can go to these open house things, which we did not realize. You have to write your name down, but no one’s checking to see if it’s even your real name. You do not have to present a photo of yourself doing the backstroke through your money bin.

And then you roam around, making disparaging remarks about wallpaper borders. The homeowners aren’t there, so what they don’t hear won’t hurt them. It is my personal and frequently-voiced opinion that wallpaper borders should be made illegal, possibly via a rider tacked on to some federal act. We saw a perfect house, but there were two borders in each room. I mentally calculated the time it would take me to steam and scrape off these beautiful harvest scenes, these sailboats and grapevines and bears clutching balloon bouquets. Not worth it! We decided that if we can’t find a suitable makeshift chamber of horrors by the end of the year, we will just buy a crappy one and burn it down for fun.

In further “people really live this way” news, I went to Costco yesterday. It seems purchasing a house requires something called a “down payment,” and this requires “saving money.” So I guess we won’t be eating Komodo dragon carpaccio at every meal anymore. Costco left me with a raging headache, 3,500 Q-tips, and a deep sense of shame and my own mortality. Why, I saw a man up-end a two-gallon jug of barbecue sauce and chug it right in the checkout lane. So this is what we’ve become. Peeping Tom bulk shoppers. Filthy-filthy-can’t-get-clean.

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