Entranceway Dining Room Living Room (featuring a finely shaped Christmas tree) Steep Stairs Smart Room (is it smarter than Glenn?) My house is a cookie-cutter house. A house built from a cookie-cutter plan. One plan of many in the builder's cookie-cutter set, and there are many builders, but, still, a cookie-cutter plan. As I walk or pedal through my neighborhood, from time to time I spot another house and say, "That's my house plan. They paid $1,250 extra for option B, but that's still my plan." Glenn is my brother. His house was not cut with a cookie-cutter. His builder started with an erector set -- a pile of undifferentiated raw material. And he wasn't even really a builder. I'm pretty sure he wasn't even builder material. I'm not even sure all the bulbs were lit in his chandelier. Glenn's house is that kind of house. Now, it's a very nice house, and well built. It just has... hmmm... personality. Lots of personality. For example, the door in the kitchen that goes down to the cellar has a bolt. On the kitchen side.... What was down in the cellar that required a bolt on the kitchen door to keep it down there? Or take the stairs, the ones going upstairs. They're so steep you almost need an ice axe and a Sherpa guide to climb them. Too steep for Judi, the vertigo sufferer. The weirdness of the house makes it a perfect vessel for Glenn's eclectic contents. Including, among those contents, Glenn. I think if Zen could build a house and Zen could inhabit it, it would be Glenn's house. And Glenn. I looked up "eclectic" in the dictionary: "(i klek´tik), adj. selecting or made up of elements from different sources." This is just a sampling: Glenn's computer is set up in an old wooden student's desk -- you know, the kind Jake and Elwood sat at when they visited the Penguin in The Blues Brothers. For that matter, the kind that I sat at when I was in grade school. The dining room furnishings include a manual typewriter, an English concertina (a musical instrument), and a telescope. The downstairs bathroom sports a convex mirror (one of those "see around corners" mirrors that they usually use to prevent collisions). You will be comforted, as you enter a bathroom, to see a "no hunting or shooting allowed" sign on the door -- yes, the bathrooms are hunting-free zones in Glenn's house. I know it made me feel better as I sat on the toilet with my pants around my ankles. The living room features one of those big plastic balls that you're supposed to lay on, on your back, to stretch your spine. Glenn uses it as a footstool. I could also mention the large (and bright) ceramic parrot on a perch (it used to belong to our mother), and the antique fire alarm bell (that used to belong to our grandfather Monahan) hanging on a wall. And then there's the room that Glenn is trying to turn into a "smart room" by nailing old circuit boards to the wall. The property that his house sits on is very nice. It's at the peak of a mountain ridge, with a hilltop behind it that overlooks the house. I regret that it was too dark for me to take pictures outside.