Another house on the street's up for sale. If it follows the pattern of the last year, the sale will go like this:

• House will sit on market for 2-6 weeks with an insanely high sale price. Like $100,000 more than what the original owner paid.
• "SALE PENDING" sign will be slapped on current For Sale sign.
• For Sale sign will be taken down.
• For Rent sign will become seemingly permanent addition to neighborhood landscape.
• Eventually, For Rent sign will come down and meth-lab-type tenants will move in, securing the mullet's death grip on the neighborhood hair styles.
  

I'm not going to say this was a nice neighborhood when we moved in, because it wasn't, not in the traditional sense. It's a working-class neighborhood filled with no-frills houses that were meant for first-time homebuyers. It was supposed to be a place where families could build a future in the safety of a suburb. Ick. We bought in because the house was dirt cheap and the interest rates were still in the basement, and we were seduced by the idea of ownership.

In the intervening three years, it has gone down. Gravel from the xeroscaped lawns is always in the street, plastic toys are left in random yards, bricks have been knocked out of the retaining wall near our property so many times that the neighborhood association gave up replacing them because, "they're just going to tear it down again." There are no trees.

Nobody owns, so nobody bothers.

Adam has taken to calling it the Tenaments at West Pointe. Lends the neighborhood a nice Dickensonian air (aire?). I take bets on when the HazMat team will be in and when a reporter from Channel 4 will do a stand-up in front of our house, begining with "Shots were fired..."

We've been tossing around the idea of a move for about a year. I want to move into a loft downtown, Adam wants an older, smaller house in the North Valley. Or we could toss in the towel and light out for Australia. Anything away from here.