We’ve seen a lot of houses now. There was the house with the goat out back--we stood around in 110 degree heat looking at all the weird crap that was piled up outside the door in which wasps were nesting while the listing agent hunted for a way inside. It used to be a feed store. The ceilings were all about 5 feet high.

The house where someone had bashed in the front wall to make a couple of picture windows. Strange things had happened there—pieces of abandoned art, odd cabinetry that looked like some high schooler’s project for shop, and then, in the back, a perfect little room with a beehive fireplace like the maid’s quarters in a Mexican hacienda. The tiny kitchen was dominated by a 1950s six-burner, two-oven stove, very rare. Restored, worth maybe ten grand. The guest house could’ve been a rustic cabin in a Raymond Chandler novel. Something had died outside the front door and hadn’t been properly buried.

Most recently, we looked at a house where the owner was having a yard sale in absentia, leaving signs atop piles of glass bricks and old clothes. A bowflex and one of those cross-country skiing machines didn’t seem to be for sale. Mr. Carruthers commented that cross-country skiing machines are stupid anyway. We put an offer in on that one. We won’t be the new owners of the Crazy Tenant House, as we found out earlier this week, though the pot plants may still be available…

Roy lurches up off the bed and grinds some coffee—it’s Nicaraguan cup of excellence that he roasted himself, filling the house with a peculiarly dense smoke that required us to walk around waving sheets in an attempt to clear the air. He fires up the James Bond espresso maker and pulls a shot.

“Wow, massive crema!” he exclaims, not for the first time. Knocking back his espresso, he wonders if real estate is really the right investment right now. As our nation's pole star Sarah Palin has recently asserted, we might be heading for another Great Depression. Should we start a café instead? Leave the country? Berkshire Hathaway has backed away from insuring bank deposits, a subtle move that is scarier than all the headlines put together. Even so, as Buffett suggests, “be greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy.” Maybe now’s the time to take a good long look at the stock market.