Brainpower blog.

A microblog for today, since I need to be in bed shortly. It's been a week of nighttime irritable baby syndrome, really two nights of it that seems like a week. That, and tomorrow I am speaking to about five hundred people at a meeting room at the Chicago Hyatt fairly early in the morning. Some of these people might be under the impression that I really know something about commercial real estate. Fortunately, my main job isn't to speak, but to facilitate questions from the audience to a panel of six real estate luminaries -- a group that actually does know something about commercial real estate.

"What you have hear is brainpower. Commercial real estate brainpower. More than that, what you the audience have is access to that brainpower, and my job is mere to facilitate things." That, more or less, will be part of my opening.

There will be no faith healing of deals gone sour.

And speaking of real estate -- the residential kind, with is the Sun to commercial real estate's Moon -- contracts have been signed and bankers are at work, and come August we will move. Life will still be suburban, though if you imagine a clock imposed on a map of Chicago, we will be moving from an 8 o'clock suburb to a 10 o'clock suburb, somewhat further out. It's a larger house, but not too large. It's a larger mortgage -- a deeper hole -- but payments will be tolerable, since interest rates are the lowest since... maybe since Arabic numerals were introduced to Christian Europe. Astute timing? A canny sense of the market? Naah. Nothing but luck.

Best of all, Lilly can walk to school, when the time comes, and it will be soon (she's moving up to K from pre-K come September). Ann will too, when that time comes. I will have a longer walk to a commuter rail station, but except in the worst weather, it will be walkable, though probably not as pleasant as my current walk, since it looks like I will have to walk along a couple of large streets most of the way. But there are sidewalks. Building a suburb without sidewalks ought to count as a minor crime against humanity.