Whew...

I can feel the laryngitis coming on. I've been dry-coughing for the last two days, ever since they put me on antibiotics. My voice is sore and tired, hoarse even. But I can sleep this evening, after I finish my rounds.

Pathology exam: 77%

This afternoon: physical diagnosis at the peds clinic. I'd be excited if I felt less shitty. Tonight: I'm not going to choir, that much is certain. So we're going to go look at a few more houses. And, as promised, the account of the house-hunting trip from Saturday, slightly out of order: The house in Eldrado Hills (note: it really is spelt "eldrado" on the sign; it must be someone's gross miseducation on the subject) was nice, but there was an oddness about it. Perhaps it was the ceilings six inches too low in the addition section. Perhaps it was the fact that there was still stuff all through the house - furniture, little projects, the old Pinto station wagon in the garage - that made it feel not-home. And there was that baseball hole in the top vent. A nice place, but not what we wanted. Overall: 2/5. Next up was a positively beautiful place in Old Brook Farm. Layout was perfect, lots of cabinet space, a glass-top range in an angle counter, trees in the yard, huge over-garage storage...the house was gorgeous. With only one tiny problem: it's not been winterized. 32 degrees in the house. Frozen water in the toilets. The pipes are almost certainly broken, and they're laid in the slab. Plus, the owners owe almost half again as much as the house is worth on it - they're in danger of being foreclosed on, so they won't pay for the pipes to be fixed. I could cry. What a waste of a beautiful house. 4/5, dropped to 1/5 for the pipes. A tiny foreclosure in up-your-nose area off of Wallen Road, where the new houses start at $110,000. It was cute, I'll grant that, but the lingering impression we had was of looking for another door that one could open up and find the rest of the house. Half of the floor space, I swear, was the gigantic master bath and closet. 3/5. The house my mom suggested we look at. I love you, Mom, but I'm never letting you pick out a house for me again. Walked in and the house reeked of cigarette smoke, bad enough to give me a headache. It was listed as vacant, according to Kris, but the phone was still working, there was rotting food in the fridge and dishes in the sink. No furniture save for an ancient electric organ, a cabinet TV, and a stereo system. Clothing scattered all over the floor in the bedrooms, including pay stubs with child support deductions on them. And then we went down to the basement. The furnace room (in which I had to turn the bulb to get any light) smelt of gas, and the gas line running to the water heater gave Dad nigh-apoplexy. There was a large crawlspace filled with random crap - the kind of space often featured in Discovery Channel specials where the white-trash husband kills his white-trash wife, stuffs her body in the crawl, and then sells the house and all its furniture and skips town. The house was quickly dubbed the "white-trash slaughterhouse", and the name stuck. 1/5. One up in Monarch Park, a precious little house on the inside. I didn't expect to like it from the outside, but it was indeed cute. The sellers had tacked little signs onto things to show us what we should look at - new cabinets, the shed key ("Worth the trip!" proclaimed the sign), new carpets. It really was adorable, and clean and neat and had a giant L-shaped area that covered most of the ground floor. Dad didn't like the drywall job in it - says it wasn't too professional - but that was the only quibble we could come up with. But it just didn't feel like us. 4.5/5, but not our house. And the final one was Jim's place. I could just die for that basement, but the bedrooms were like cubicles. 10x10 or something like that, with tiny closets. A cute place, even if I did almost kill myself coming in from the deck (wet feet, slick linoleum, whoops) - but most definitely not what we're looking for. Plus, Dad was apoplectic over the electrical main running along the wall and over the door without any conduit. 3/5. We got a feeling for what we liked and didn't - but what we liked wasn't available, and what we didn't was. Tonight we've got three more houses to take a peek at...and I've got to scamper off to Pediatrics lectures.