Not that we’re looking–we’re renters for life–but the wife keeps finding cute little places in the L.A. Times Hot Property section that are a million five or more. And the thing is, they are cute little places. The kind of house you see tucked away on a hillside cul de sac amid shade trees and roses. It’s gotten to the point now that cute costs as much as fifty average Americans make in one year. Pretty cost twice that. You don’t even wanna know gorgeous.

We were driving in a stretch of Burbank a couple nights ago, where the city butts up against the Verdugos and can’t go any further. Cute were the bottom end places, most of the houses were in the pretty range, with the occasional gorgeous occupying half a block. We must have gone miles, winding with the streets, once coming smack against the mountain, the bottom of a cliff really, and you could smell pine and hear birds we don’t hear down here in the Silver Lake hills. But it occurred to me as we drove along that we had never been up there before. Never been on any of those streets, and that we know no one who lives up there. They’re not in our class, the wife joked. But they aren’t. They’re in the class where cute is a mere million five, and I can’t even imagine that.