Wanna buy a house?
You can have mine. It's for sale. This tells you something about me and my family: We'll put our house on the market, with not much more aforethought than we'd put into going to the grocery store. "Well, it's January; time to put the house on the market." For most people, it would be a momentous occasion, or cause for great trepidation, or something. For us, it's just another project.

The purpose is simple. As I've mentioned before, the one-way commute to work is 35 miles. That's too damn far. It's been too damn far since the minute we moved here in September 1999, but it got a lot farther a year later when I gave up my four-day-a-week night job for a five-day-a-week day job. Driving 35 miles at 2 a.m. four times a week is one thing; driving 35 miles at 9 a.m. -- supposedly not the peak of rush hour -- every freakin' day is another thing entirely. Even so, I was just kind of starting to get used to it. I feel a bond with the talk radio assholes. I'm up to, like, 10 CDs in regular rotation. I can rattle off all the exits in order from Highway 121 to the Woodall Rodgers Freeway.

Then one day the unthinkable happened. One day, The Wife had to drive to the big city to take the Young Daughter to see the doctor. When The Wife does something, and doesn't like it, things change. After making that drive, she proclaimed: "Dude, your commute sucks. We shall sell the house and buy a house closer to the Big City." And so it was.

So there's a sign in our front yard declaring the house can be yours, for a price. And it's a pretty steep price, and we're not shy about saying so. We're in no hurry. The reason is simple: We have no place to move. We have some ideas about where we want to live, but nothing is on paper yet.

This house holds a special distinction for us: In 11 years of marriage, it's the only house in which we've spent three consecutive Christmases.

We like change, and that manifests itself in some pretty dramatic (if not totally financially responsible) ways. In 2001, we neither bought a car nor moved -- only the second calendar year in which we've done neither. The other year was 1998, and in that year, I had three different job titles in three different departments.

In a way, it's kind of cool. The one constant through all that time has been each other, and anywhere we both are, well, that's home. I don't need to stand in one place to be deeply rooted as long as I have her.