A few days ago our home was appraised to provide a value estimate for what will probably be a bloody drawn out divorce between my parents.  The estimate came back lower than what I thought it’d be based on zillow.com and I immediately began cheering.  My coworkers thought I was insane and my more liberal cohorts started railing against the fed, et al.  They don’t realize that my brother and I want to buy our own house and any drop is a plus.  If we can reduce the value further by re-directing the Mill Race Creek to run through our kitchen, we have a backhoe, a front-end loader, and a construction contractor that owes us a few favors.