Neida the babysitter has a nephew, Joseph, who really likes playing with Sophia. So much so that when Neida comes home after an afternoon with Fia Joseph points at the front door and says, “Back. Get Fia.” So much so that for Joseph’s birthday the family decided to take him and one friend to Sea World, and the friend he chose was Sophia.

So since 7:30am Darin and I have had a Fia-less day, and it’s been…weird. Like, we went out to breakfast and not having to worry about a place Sophia would like. Watching TV uninterrupted. (Well, mostly. We still do have Simon about.)

We’ve been talking about houses and moving and whether we should rent a place or what we should do. We don’t know. I sent my brother-in-law on a rather fruitless quest to look at some more houses. Pointless. We’ll just wait until we get up there. It’ll be easier that way. And certainly nothing has just sprung up in front of us.

We are not watching the news. Amazing, isn’t it—now that the war has started, I can’t stand to even read about it in blogs (despite the vast quantity of readers the heroic Sean Paul has sent my way during his insane posting spree). Of course, I can’t seem to get away from it, as you can tell from the previous entry. I just turn on some old damn movie and there it is, WWI. The War to End All Wars.

Well, there’s the Oscars tonight. I think the only tension there will be: will stars try to sneak political commentary in? I haven’t even seen any of the damn movies. Why am I watching again?

So, we’re back. Darin and I flew up to San Jose Friday morning sans enfants, spent three full days looking at houses, and then flew back Sunday night.

We didn’t find a house. We did get a lot of information about areas to live up there. And what the housing market is like at the moment. And, evidently, what the employment market is like—the realtor kept saying, “Your job is secure? Your friends, they all have jobs?”

The housing market is still insane. Maybe not as insane as it was—several times our realtor looked at the house and looked at the price being asked and she said, “What? Are they dreaming?”

Let me tell you about dreaming: we didn’t find a house that didn’t need at least $250,000 of remodeling (as a start) until we looked at places over $1.2M.

I can’t even wrap my mind around those numbers. I always thought if you bought a house with that many digits, everything came gold-plated. But these days, a couple hundred thou here, a couple hundred thou there, and pretty soon you’re talking about a heavy-duty mortgage.

We didn’t get pre-approval on a mortgage before we went. Big mistake. We have to run the numbers, figure out a budget, figure out what kind of load we can carry.

Of the 30+ properties we looked at, we only saw one that both Darin and I responded to, and it didn’t fit our criteria in so many ways (including price, but we were pretty discouraged at this point and wanted to see anything). But it was unique and had personality and was really attractive in an off-beat way. The house was shaped like a U, with a kitchen/Great Room combination on one end, the bedrooms down the bend, and a gigantic living room—700 feet?—at the far end. The deck overlooking Cupertino and Los Altos was the middle of the U, and the pool on the deck ran into the living room, so you could begin your laps inside the house.

“So our kids can drown in the comfort of their own living room,” we said.

And since the house was on the hill, there really wasn’t room for the kids to run around. But the house was so funky and unusual that we kept talking about it the rest of the day. A house with a little personality really puts the vast majority of the cookie-cutter ones in the shade.

Unfortunately, we’re probably going to have to find a run-downish one and spend El Dinero Grande to add some personality to it.

(The title of this entry, by the way, is a play on a complaint Darin’s heard a lot over the past few months. Some kind of prize to the first person who posts the actual complaint. I know! I’ll send you a postcard.)

Everyone visualize Darin and Diane finding the perfect house at a price somewhere in the range they can afford.

Thank you.