Personal Dork Assistant

ROFL

Screw the house in the El Cerrito hills. We should've gone for the 19th-century chateau in Brittany (complete with 13.5 acres of wooded park), or maybe Burgundy. Would've been tough to hit the Open House, though.

One of the more fascinating things one learns from the UGE [Unique Global Estates] site is that living in the Bay Area can skew your sense of what bargain means. In terms of price per square foot, almost every mansion, palace and estate is cheaper than property in humble little Albany, California, where little working-class bungalows sell for upward of $400 per square foot.