There's a great article here by a guy who likes to walk the long streets of Chicago from beginning to end. In this one, he strolls along Belmont Avenue from the lake to Elmwood Park. His walking stories always seem to show the city at its heart, and this one's particularly good.

I'll just go for the hat trick post here!

I'm not buying a place (yet), but I like to keep my eye on the local market. I never looked at single family houses before, thinking that I wouldn't find anything around here for under $150K unless it was a townhouse/condo. Well, there are a few short sales on tiny 1950s-era houses in Wheeling under that price! They definitely don't look fabulous--tract housing never is--but the fact that some are going for that low blows my mind. One's a 3BR/1BA house with detached garage and is NOT on the direct approach path to the local airport (the other two are), and it's asking $140K. Wow.

ETA: I bumped up my search to $175K, and got a lot more hits. Look at the living room here--it's oraaaange!!

One thing to consider in buying. Expectations are that housing prices will continue to drop for some time, and that when they stop dropping they will level off, not rise. So don't be in a hurry to buy anything you are not thrilled about living in. (Buying a house you love is different cause it is not just a matter of economics.)

Lord, that's a hideous living room, Kathy.

I don't have a down payment and my credit rating is definitely not up to the scrutiny of a standard 20% down mortgage, so I'm not going to be buying for a few years at the earliest. I figure by then, the market should be at a reasonable level--even at these lower prices, housing expenses would still more than 30% of my monthly pay, and I don't want to go too far above that level.

Isn't it, ita?! I admire tacky interior decorating at a certain level (not to live in, but it's fun to see), but if I stepped into that place, I think I'd go blind.

My living room is an orange -- terra cotta or pumpkin - take you pick. But now that the matching carpet is gone -- and none of the furniture matches -- it is tolerable. And oddly other people love it.

So can someone explain this swine flu thing to me. I get the WHO and CDC -- their job is to stop disease from spreading everywhere. But why are schools closing with just one or two kids sick? I may have missed something , but I haven't seen anything that says it jumps quickly, it looks like it behaves like a normal flu. Am I under reacting?

Kathy, is that Wheeling, West Virginia?

No, Wheeling, Illinois. We're in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, near Northbrook and Deerfield, and not too far east of Schaumburg. It's a nice bedroom community that grew out of the corn fields after WWII, so a lot of the tinier tract houses date to the 1950s. There are also lots of more recent subdivisions if I were to increase my maximum to $300K, but that ain't gonna happen.

Yay for babytea! Welcome and congrats to his wonderful parents!

Kat, I am so with you! I swear, as the kids get older I feel like my already tenuous grip on the time/space continuum is starting to slip.