What was once called the Seed has now graduated to Sprout. We think it looks like us, only at six-inch scale.

Well, the secret is out and the Seed is now four months into its journey towards real-babyhood. Leah is eating two to three lunches per day and falling asleep around 9:30, and the nesting instinct is coming on strong. We have decided to forgo the typical "Let's paint and decorate everything with bunnies!" impulse by going straight to a hunt for a new house.

House hunting is probably sort of like regular hunting: tons of wasted time followed by short bursts of furious activity and stress. Last weekend we saw 15 houses in a variety of towns, some of which we will never be able to afford houses in. From what we can tell, the house search goes like this:
- Find realtor and describe desired house and spending limit.
- See house that meets spending limit. Step over dead body in hallway, remark on noise from overhead flight path. (An aside: The realtor said, "Wow - look at this cute house in Bedford. And it's in your price range! Let's go see it!" Leah re-read the listing. "What's 'avigatin eaemet'," said Leah. The realtor looked again. "That's supposed to say, 'aviation easement,'"she said.)
- Realtor says, "So, you guys are more into...well, you don't want a big project, right?"
- See houses just outside of price range. Walk through 7-11 parking lot to get to front door. "This is good, because 7-11 plows this for you in the winter," says realtor.
- See four more houses, some with water damage, some with highways for back yards, some with collapsing basement walls.
- Pass point of exhaustion (house seven of the day). See more clunkers.
- See great house. Stand on porch while realtor calls listing broker to get you inside. Have phrase "under agreement" defined for you.
- See second great house. Attempt to do monthly payment calculations in head on house $40,000 out of expanded, revised price range.
- Go home, rev up for next weekend.

We have learned that we still don't like ranch houses, that a garrison Colonial is really nothing like a Colonial, and that every house that isn't a Tudor or a Richard Neutra original is called a Cape around here. We have also learned that it is not considered impolite to leave an open house immediately if there is a great view of a cemetery from the living room or if the entire upstairs is finished with reddish linoleum in place of, say, drywall. (Luckily, these features were both confined to one awful, awful house.)

Currently, we have somewhere between two and four realtors working on this project, if you count the guy who we broke up with after he spent two entire open houses smoking in the back yard while all the other couples got cozy with their brokers and talked about the virtues of natural gas over oil heat. Both of them have a clear advantage over jet fuel.

I will never again use the phrase "going postal" in a derogatory manner. Here's the story: this morning, I got out of my car to go to work and grabbed about 8 letters to mail in the mailbox next to my building. One of the letters contained two checks. It did not, however, contain an address. I though, "Good thing I caught that before I mailed it." And then something distracted me and I mailed it anyway, not 15 seconds after noting its lack of address.

So I called the post office, nervous. No problem, they said. You're not the first person who's done this.

Ten minutes ago, Nancy called. A letter carrier. I'm downstairs, she said. Your Cambridge Savings Bank envelope? Indeed it was. There's no stamp, she said.

I went downstairs, took the envelope, wrote the address on it, and went to my car for a stamp. I like to carry stamps everywhere, because who knows? But today the cupboard was bare.

Sorry, I said. No need to wait. I'll mail it tomorrow.

Do you have 37 cents?, she said.

Imagine if this was how it worked: You have a letter and you call the post office and ask them to call when they're coming by, and to bring a stamp.

I only had a dollar, but she made change. Fantastic.

Another election has drawn to a close, and yet again the results suck. Conceding is almost worse than losing, I think. Imagine if the Red Sox had lost Game 7 against the Yankees and then taken them all out for beers to celebrate, stopping to mention to a Boston Globe reporter, "What idiot roots for the Red Sox anyway? Even we knew the Yankees would win." How can someone who volunteers to go to Vietnam be such a Nancy-boy when it matters? Was he thinking that he would preserve his good name to run again someday?

But, we continue to receive resumes, which brightens my day. Today we got one that included the candidate's weight: 185 pounds. It did not, however, include his height, and so it is hard to know what to make of this stat.

Tuesday was our second writing class. My boss was in a cranky mood, owing to the 85 spider bites he had received in a dodgy Midtown hotel the week before, and picked a fight with the woman over the content (classical economics) of a short passage which we were supposed to be using to correct some sentences written in the passive voice. As a former radio jingle writer, she was unprepared to debate economic theories, and it grew tense. Then she tried to tell me that I had done my sentence wrong, claiming that every use of the verb "to be" was, in fact, a passive construction.

It reminded me of the time my fifth grade teacher, God bless her, looked out the window into a blinding snowstorm and sent me to the office to see if we would be having outdoor recess. I told her that we would probably be inside, because of, you know, all that snow, but there was no convincing her. I went downstairs, asked the office ladies, and they said, "Huh? Wait, did Mrs. Hearn send you?" Good times. There's nothing sadder than a teacher who, having made a glaring factual error, won't back down.

For the next class, we're learning how to write e-mail. Issue #1, according to the19-page handout we have to read: when it's ok - and not ok - to use emoticons. :) !