I am not a tidy person. I have always strived to justify my general lack of interest in the order of things around me as a symptom associated with being a forgetful professor who is always locked into big ideas but can’t see the piles of garbage that get in the way. But I decided not to become a professor when I left college so I have little to use as an excuse save that I have realized over time that I am mostly a lazy person. Among the odd compensations for this in my life is to have a wife who is much neater than me who keeps my world in order as I try to increase the general chaos in my world. It is a good match for us in the regard that she is more obsessive compulsive and I take a laissez faire approach to living. Sarah worries and I keep her calm. I forget to take out the garbage and she lets me know when it is garbage day.

This weekend we started our search for a new location to habitate with some of the first realistic thoughts being put into where we might live if we were to grow out of this location in Brookline. We are not thinking that we need to migrate immediately given that Madeline still can’t do a full roll over and she has no siblings. But we know that once baby number two or three is born it is going to be impossible to roam about in two bedrooms, one bathroom, and a kitchen that is 50% occupied by a washer and dryer. The baby seating and rocking items that are growing out of the floor like mushrooms including a bouncy seat, swing, gyminee, car seat, high chair, rocking chairs, and a little foam seat will only increase in their coverage until we are in a fungal forest of jr. seating objects. So for now we figure it is only a matter of time somewhere between two years and eight before we will feel like we are old folks living in a shoe.

So we went to a private viewing of a condo on Saturday morning that as previously mentioned costs way more than we would ever have considered spending. Sarah’s initial rationale for this was to see what lots of money would get you and whether it would be worth it. Our sincere hope was to find that rich people live poor loveless miserable lives epitomized by their miserly living quarters that are so rank with the stain of opulence that it would cast a dark pall over the lives of any one to move into such a space. We also thought maybe that a more expensive location would be just another sham where people have figured out how to get your money by installing a bigger refrigerator or painting the walls with a secret green the color of wintergreen leaves.

So we went for our private viewing with a hope that we would be disappointed with the parking, the home, the view, the street noise, the neighbors, or the nasty restrictive condo rules. The expensive place we looked at unfortunately had a layout that looked the way a condo that I would like to live in would. It was about 2500 square feet on one floor laid out with a large kitchen, two open rooms in the front. The children’s bedrooms were perfectly children sized. A room to watch television in was cozy looking. They had a small room for a guest, a nanny, or a visiting parent sleeping the night. The dining room was just the right size for a dining room table and next to the kitchen where one belongs. The floors were a nice quality wood and I felt very at home looking at the closet in the entranceway hiding games like Monopoly, Scrabble, and Sorry. The master bedroom had an attached bathroom with a whirlpool tub with jets. They had a tandem parking space deeded with the location.

This condo that we were looking at looked like the kind of place that adults live in and I was struck afterwards about how the place we are living in today still has the feel of a place that a young sloppy bachelor might live in with his girlfriend. I believe that this feeling is the main reason for not going out to look at other people’s homes.

Beyond just being laid out well it was decked out in all of the glory of a home that is looking to be sold. The realtors have special staging activities that they do to move perfect looking furniture, nice paintings, thoughtful books, and decorate things to look like you would want to live there. For the home, the private viewing is the first impression, the first date, the immaculate ideal coming out party where the home can show how beautiful she really could be if someone let her look that good. And it had these teasing qualities like that it was marked down 20% from the initial offering because it hadn’t sold at the higher price that always makes me interested even if the marked down price is as astronomical as the original price.

So we had trouble sleeping last night and spent time looking at the site Zillow, a map system that shows the price of your neighbors properties with good accuracy. It is almost as amazing as looking at Google Earth to see aerial views of neighborhoods with price tags on each property. We discovered things like – It is really more expensive to buy anything in Brookline than in Newton and Bedford. So we have gotten nice and confused about what we are looking for.

Today we went out and looked at two more locations, both more in the price range of someone who isn’t a robber baron, and our general reaction was that they both were inferior to the place we saw on Saturday. We couldn’t imagine how anyone could live in these other poorly laid out hovels in comparison to this one really nice looking place that we saw yesterday. The place where every item was in the right spot including the girls bunk beds in their room painted pink and the curtains nicely matching the wallpaper or paint in each room.

So as I was about to go to play with a computer or two as I am apt to do I looked around at the piles of junk that have accumulated on the dresser by the bed, clothing on the floor, the papers and magazines on the coffee table, computer desk, and started compulsively neatening and cleaning things up to try to at least make the best of where we are and try to live a little more like the imaginary people living in that condo yesterday who had everything looking just perfect.