I am new to this old house thing. Loved everybody else's old places for years. I've always seen myself "ending up" in a charming old joint, maybe something like the place Michael Douglas ran in Wonder Boys, apparently just to house all those attractively eccentric college kids. What can I say? Victorian quaintness has always just looked like home.

And then there is reality, just about now rounding third and heading straight for creaky home in Dryden: cold, unfinished, fairly dangerous, rather filthy, and most of all strange. I used to move about once a year, many many moons ago, loved picking up and going to a new abode. But spending a decade-plus in one place seems to have bred the adaptability right out of me. It's the whole Anchored-down-in-Anchorage thing I suppose. This soon-to-be-lovely place is all for the best of course and everyday dawns a little brighter and all that, but for one thing, what's with all the people in my house banging on stuff and exuding clouds of dust all day? Oh, those are the people we are paying to make this place nicer. Thought they'd be all done by now.

I don't know anything about remodeling, using contractors etc (true, true). But the Universal Truth has been made clear, and clearer and clearest: Everything you try to do with an old house will cost more and take longer than you think it will.

OK OK as my Brit pals would say, whinge someplace else. So I won't tell much about how the Executive VP of the place where I moved here to work, in our one and only meeting, had but one piece of advice to give me as I sally forth: Don't move in until you are done with any remodeling.

In the meantime, here's a picture of our pretty car. It's likely the best cheap used car you can buy, because they are way undervalued. It seems people simply don't like the look of station wagons. Feast your eyes on the last old fashioned wagon people-hauler made in America. This is the (pause for effect) Collector's Edition 1996 Buick Roadmaster Estate Wagon, purchased from Fred at BigStationWagons.Com. It is a beast but a cool one, cost next to nothing, has the same engine as the Corvette and gets 23 miles per gallon highway. With this mighty steed we can do most anything an SUV can do (except require heavy payments) and what's more it's easy to find in the Wegman's parking lot.