When Ben and I first started looking for a house, we spent a lot of time driving around the neighborhoods we were interested in, looking at the outsides of houses that we'd found on the internet and picking up flyers for other houses. We were in the Highlands neighborhood one day, just off 32nd and Lowell. There was a cute little brick bungalow that had a for sale sign in the lawn, so I had Ben pull over. I got out of the car and went to pick up one of their spec sheets. As I opened the thing on the sign that held the descriptions, a man came out of the house, probably to water plants or mow the grass or something. I saw him, and I panicked. I grabbed the sheet, ran back to the car, threw myself in and frantically told Ben to go NOW. He didn't question me, just drove off fast, but then asked me why. I said, “He saw me!”

Ben looked at me. “He saw you?”

“Yes! He saw me! Now he knows we're interested!”

There was a pause. “Now he knows we're interested.”

“Yes!!!”

"And he shouldn't know that?"

"No! God, of course not!"

Apparently, in house-hunting I was a 12 year old girl who didn't want the cute boy in English class to know she had a crush on him. Apparently, the fact that the man was SELLING his HOUSE and WANTED people to be interested in it and stop and look at it and hopefully BUY it didn't keep me from running and hiding behind my best friend's locker, heart pounding and stomach churning.

Ben laughed at me, as well he should. Hell, I laughed at me. It was silly and weird and if it happened again, I'd still run. In some ways, I may always be 12 years old.



Update on the parking lot: Okay, it wasn't being repaved. It was actually being used for the LoDo Music Festival - they set up a stage and had it fenced off and everything. So if you had a house guest coming to stay with you, wouldn't you remember that and tell everyone else who lived in the house so they didn't walk out of the bathroom naked and meet your Great Aunt Sally for the first time? Because I would.