Remember that nearby house whose price I was rather astounded by?

Got home from Thanksgiving vacation yesterday to discover a SALE PENDING sign on it.

Still crazy ’round these here parts.

(The $4.75m one hasn’t sold. Yet.)

So, we were in the security line at O’Hare and I was counting off the bags we’re bringing through and I suddenly thought, Oh crap.

Sophia was clutching a plastic bag, inside of which were the two presents she got at the Adler-Ostendorf family gift exchange: a plastic box of makeup and a tea set complete with checkered table cloth, creamer and sugar bowl, and toy cutlery. Including little toy knives that couldn’t cut butter, but they’re knives nonetheless.

“We have to check the tea set!” I said.

“Oh shit, you’re right,” Darin said.

My rolling computer case, the big one I take on vacations, can double as an overnight bag (for those overnight business trips, natch). We pulled the sub-computer bag (the one actually holding the computer) out and hurriedly shoved Sophia’s bag in. Then Darin left the line and went back to the skycaps to check the bag.

Sophia was very upset, as you can imagine — she has barely let that tea set out of her hands since she got it, and every single member of her extended family was treated to at least one tea party during our Thanksgiving. We tried to explain to her that if we didn’t check the tea set, what could possibly happen is that they take all the toy knives out of it and throw them away, or even worse they take the tea set away permanently. She was not convinced. All she knew was that she wasn’t having a tea party on the plane and we promised she could have a tea party on the plane.

But you know: better safe than sorry.

During the descent into SFO I heard a clicking noise behind me, and I glanced back to see what it was. Another passenger was calmly knitting.

With metal needles.

Huh. Interesting.

“Is the whole ‘no sharp objects’ thing over with?” I asked Darin.

“She would have lost her mind if anything had happened to the tea set,” he said.

I am continuing apace on my Nano novel, although many thousands of words ago I accepted that this was a practice novel and not something that I want to spend any time upgrading into a real novel. When a friend asked if I was at least enjoying the experience, I said:

I am, even though it’s not a keeper. At least, in nothing like its current form. I am doing various things in it, though, like switching viewpoints, and doing flashbacks, and having scenes with multiple people in them that I haven’t done as much in the past. It’s one long practice session!

Currently I seem to be killing off half the character list and setting up the other half as suspects. Almost anything is ripe for comedy, but murder just isn’t funny as far as I’m concerned, the book’s descent into furious black comedy seems to be my way of accepting that not everything is meant to be published. And writing is never wasted: you always learn something from it (or should).

Oh, and next time? Outline.

On the route to Sophia’s school there’s a house that I love to look at every time we walk by it. It’s surrounded by a stone fence, about five or six feet high, with an iron gate on to the street. There’s a giant playset for kids — as high as a two-story house, made out of redwood, with lots of Habitrails for crawling around. And the house itself (the adult Habitrail) is gorgeous on the outside. I looked it up on mlslistings.com, and discovered the house is as big as it looks, with 5500 square feet and more than a half acre of land. I would love to see the Open House on this one.

Asking price? $4,750,000.

But — believe me, I know how this sounds — I can completely understand that price. That house is quite a package A 100-year-old mansion, sitting on a fantastic plot of land, in an enviable part of an expensive town.

The house two doors down from us just went on the market. It’s 3 bedrooms, 2 baths, less than 2000 square feet. It’s beautiful inside, from the photos, with lots of stone work. And apparently it has more land that I would have guessed from the outside, but probably not a bigger lot than we’re on.

Asking price: $1,675,000

Two words: holy. crap.

The above-the-fold in the San Jose Mercury News today was the Bay Area’s current median house prices.

Santa Clara County’s sizzling housing market cooled a little bit last month, but the median price of a single-family home jumped to a record of $714,250, bucking speculation of a downturn or bursting bubble.

That’s a 19 percent increase from October of last year, when the median price was what now seems a modest $600,000.

The article goes on to say that things are cooling down, the market’s reaching equilibrium, the same overnight-craziness isn’t apparent.

On the up side… if you do manage to cash out of a California home, you can go almost anywhere else in the country and buy the side of a mountain.

On the down side… what’s the monthly payment on a $714,250 house? Who the hell can afford that? And how far are people going to have to drive in order to live somewhere affordable? Or more affordable than this, at any rate?

We’re not in this house for the immediate value it holds — we love this neighborhood, love the walkability of it, are happy as little clams to be here and have the kids here.

Which is good because… when things come back to earth, it’s going to hurt. A lot. And we won’t be going anywhere anytime soon.