I'm not big into permanence. I kinda like to bounce around and see lots of places. But still, I like to live in a house. For me, buying a house is not settling down, it's just common sense.

I mean, I need a place to store my music collection (4,000-5,000 CDs, a few hundred LPs and 7"s and way too many tapes to count). To put the books (easily past a thousand there, too). To hold all the brewing equipment and finished product. That stuff takes up space. Right now, a lot of it is in a storage unit. And I don't like it there. I would like to be able to get to my stuff. And I can't.

For that and a thousand other reasons, Barbara (my wife, of course) and I are looking for a house. We've been wandering about for the last month or so, checking out different neighborhoods and domiciles. Seeing what costs what and who lives where. As I have stated before, I prefer diverse neighborhoods, places with a little tension.

We think we found such an area here in Durham. It doesn't really have an official name or anything (that we know of, anyway), but it is a nice, cohesive few blocks nestled between downtown and the south end of Duke's east campus.

While walking through, we talked to a couple who had moved in two or three years back. Before they moved to Durham, they lived in a Costa Rican cloud forest. Confirmation that this, indeed, was a cool place to be. They described the neighborhood as "politically active" (the red "respect city workers" which cropped up all over the place were a hint that way as well). I didn't really delve into that, but to be honest, a whole bunch of people thinking the same way is always bad, be it liberal or conservative. I'm not making any judgment on that, as yet. Anyway, these kind folks gave us the name of a guy who owns a good number of the rental houses in the area. We're gonna give him a call Monday.

This is one of the few places in the city with old houses that don't cost a mint. We went through one of the older, larger houses in this neighborhood. It has 12-foot-ceilings (really) and sits on a half-acre of land (right downtown!). It also needs more work than we can afford, and anyway, someone else has a contract on it. A very cool place, though.

Later in the afternoon, we toured one of the more "expensive" houses. I put that in quotes because anything in Durham under $200,000 is considered a "starter" home. Technically speaking, we can afford such a thing (at least, the banks will lend us the money and we can make the payments), but that does seem like an awful lot of money for the sorts of houses we're seeing.

This house is in a much less "edgy" neighborhood (a few blocks from where we're renting), and it isn't terribly interesting from the outside. But once walking in, we were taken by the wood floors, the full basement, functional attic (an office for me) and plenty of bedrooms if, say, we decided to foist a kid on the world.

As I said, we liked it loads. But we're probably not gonna make an offer. Too early, and well, there are a few things up in the air that we'd like to nail down before getting serious. Plus, it's loads of fun to scope out houses.

So we're going to continue our little search, bit by bit and on many fronts. We haven't settled on a neighborhood or even how much we're willing to pay. We've got general ideas, but we figure the house will really make the decision for us.

That's the idea, that someone else's home will charm us into spending more money than the average junior high school dropout will make in a lifetime. But that gets into a whole other area of discussion, the elitist notion of even shopping for houses. I don't want to go there. Not today, anyway.

Despite appearances, Jon Worley has bought a house before. Just not in Durham.