Had to drive to Newton this morning.. It's where one of the boyos doctors has her office.

I needed to drive in that general direction anyway to take care of some banking business, so I figured I may as well keep going, get some more test kits and make office visit appointments for the monkeys while I was at it.

The doc's office sits smack dab in a series of beautiful neighborhoods, filled with gorgeous old homes on nicely landscaped properties. I make this particular drive probably once a month (and I always try to combine it with trips to the bank, or a trip to a WFM that's not far from the doc's office - with the gas prices the way they are now, I cannot afford a 50 mile round trip drive 'just' to pick up test kits) and had noticed over the past few months that quite a properties had gone up for sale.

Every single one of these properties are beautiful, well maintained, old Victorian style houses. All of them are on good sized properties, with fully landscaped grounds, have nice wide driveways and 2 or 3 car garages. Now typically properties like these get turned around very very fast here. We're talking weeks, frequently only days...

Not lately.. I noticed that the same properties that were up a few months ago, were still up. And not only that, a LOT more properties had gone up. Some streets had 3 or 4 houses with 'For Sale' signs in their yards. And several of the properties that have been up for a while are now sitting there empty.. and may be sitting empty for a long time to come (as the housing market here has completely and utterly tanked).

All those beautiful houses, just sitting there empty..

Fooking depressing...

(but no, we are not experiencing an economic recession here according to the 'man in charge'.. not at all...)