Notes From A High Altitude

We arrived in Denver yesterday.

The air is clean.
The sky is blue.
The roads are wide.
There are lots of trees.
And mountains.
And good food.
And expensive homes.
And gold volvos (more on this later).
And the altitude is - HIGH.

Our rental car is huge (go America!) and a strange sea foam color. And just when I thought we were the only ones on the road in such a car, another one passed us - would you believe it was the same color.

Thank goodness our temporary housing is, well, temporary. We've learned it's always hard to know exactly what to expect when one moves to a new city and must find temp digs. I can say, however, that it is better than the mole hole we lived in when we first moved to Switzerland.

So now we are v-e-r-y motivated house hunters. We went out today. Optimistic we would find the house of our dreams. No such luck. We found, in fact, quite the opposite. And not just one house we didn't like, but 9 houses we didn't like. Why? The style of old homes in Denver is quite different from anywhere we've lived. First: they like to have bedrooms on the main floor. Second: They don't build up, they love basement living. So most of the houses have one or two bedrooms on the main floor (of a very small house) and then one bedroom - or two bedrooms - in the basement. Egads. Not exactly what we were hoping to find.

And so now we are actually contemplating, like the crazy Allbrittons we are, buying a home and blowing the top off it. Why? Because we can buy it for not much and the home is that it is right next door is worth 1.2M. But then I worry about all that work, especially with a little one, and think about how nice it would be to be out and about, rather than working on a house, and all of a sudden those big old cookie cutter homes start looking really good.

And if that isn't enough to muddle the brain, we also need to buy two cars. So I'm thinking about a Volvo Cross Country, but we just keep finding them in GOLD. And I don't want gold. Now if they had sea foam green ... just kidding.

So with all this running about, Chase didn't sleep a wink during the day. So she claimed revenge this evening. She crashed at 6, slept until 8 and will be awake until at least 11.

We should have known better...