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.)

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.

From today’s San Jose Mercury:

There are signs that the meteoric rise in Silicon Valley housing prices may be slowing — but you wouldn’t know it from the home sales numbers released Wednesday.

The median price of a single-family resale home in Santa Clara County reached a record $714,000 in August, up 2 percent from July and 21 percent from a year earlier.

It’s not going to be pretty, is it?

Maybe everyone else in the world knows this, but I didn’t:

FOR YEARS, governments all over the world have secretly been collaborating with the high-end color laser-printer industry in order to track the origin of every color copy made. They’re doing it by programming the printers to create specific patterns of yellow dots—not visible to the naked eye—on every copy. These dot patterns are codes for serial numbers, makes of printer and possibly even the time and date made. By cross-checking this information with printer company databases of people who have purchased the printers, federal agents can figure out who made a given color copy and when. No, really.

That’s…amazing.

According to the article, this technology was added to color printers in order to foil money counterfeiters. But there are so many more uses for the information…and there’s no legislation to regulate it. The printer companies just hand over whatever information the Feds ask for.

Wow.

I’d like to feel secure since I use a B&W laser printer….but somehow, I just don’t.

Have I mentioned that I love our neighborhood? A short walk to the town center, where the library is; a short walk to the playing fields of the high school, where the kids can run around; a short walk to the downtown, with lots of shops and restaurants and small-town kind of things.

Our neighbors stop us on the street and introduce themselves. A couple walking their extremely large silver-grey poodle stopped me on the street near the civic center and welcomed me to the street—they’d noticed me and the kids, I hadn’t had a clue.

One of the things I worry about raising the kids here is that there isn’t going to be a heck of a lot of diversity in a place where all the houses cost over (koff, koff) three-quarters of a million dollars. I probably shouldn’t admit that out loud, but hey: welcome to the wonderful world of California housing prices, people. Normal, well-kept houses require gigantic incomes around here.

Which is why I don’t understand why the house across the street has been, for all intents and purposes, abandoned.

It’s a nice house: about average size for this neighborhood, two story, on an odd-shaped plot of land. The lawn clearly hasn’t been mowed in months. The front porch light is always on. There’s a Datsun 280Z that has evidently been parked in the driveway through many a gust of wind and perhaps a rain shower or two.

I don’t get it. Yes, I know the job market has tanked around here, but the housing market hasn’t (and probably won’t until interest rates start their creep back up). If someone had defaulted on their mortgage, the bank would have had this puppy on the auction block post-haste, no? And if the owner simply doesn’t want it any more, why not sell it and probably clear a few bucks? Or a few hundred thousand, depending on when he or she bought it.

The neighbors on our right side, who moved in six months ago, have never seen anyone in the house.

If this house is a symptom of the economy…whoa.

Otherwise: investment oppportunity!!!

(Okay, probably not.)

Update: Of course today I see that the lawn has been mown and there’s now a huge pile of yard waste to one side of the house. The lawn isn’t being taken care of in any other way, though: it’s brown without the watering you need in the heat we’ve been having. And that Datsun is still there.