I've got houses on the brain lately. This morning I took a walk through McKinley Park and enviously admired all the charming Tudor-styled houses I will never be able to afford. Am not even sure I want to afford - if only because the thought of paying how much? for a piece of property seems silly.

Cory and I are thinking a lot about houses these days. About neighborhoods. About two-bedrooms versus three-bedrooms versus wow-FOUR-bedrooms?. I've been torn between really cute but really small and larger, more practical and several notches down on the cute scale. I've been thinking about the here-and-now and the future.

I've also been writing an essay about a house that I lived in as a kid. I've been thinking about all the houses in which I grew up. The memories I keep of them, the things I can't remember, the things I wish I didn't remember.

I've been flipping through magazines such as House Beautiful and Dwell and ReadyMade, thinking of projects, thinking of possibilities. The Apartment Therapy site has a feature on painting your floors and I think...hmmm, what if....

And I wonder where we'll be a year from now.