So I took ownership of my first house this week. Portland real estate is ridiculous but it needs everything but the bones fixed and for how close in it is it’s still bordering roughness (in Portland that means white people with script neck tattoos, the charming local term is “Felony Flats”) so I got a deal.

I realized I was starting to think as a homeowner - thinking of how I could improve my property value by improving it, and with startling ease extending the thought to the neighborhood, in a way that’s basically the motive force of gentrification and enclosure et cetera - and was startled by how smoothly and suddenly that came on. (Moneycat went through a phase fixating on the term “house-proud” and that kept coming back to me.)

Then sometime in the last week someone got into the house and extracted the (incongruously nice-ish) washer and dryer, ripping several doors off their hinges along the way, and now I never have to feel bad about that again.