I've been pretty upfront here about my general lack of enthusiasm for television viewing. In fact, I'll admit to being the worst kind of TV watcher - the PBS, snot. Yep, it's true...a little middlebrow Ken Burns documentary, with all the re-enactment and cheezy special effects, and I'm a picture of concentration and knitted brow seriousness. Our penchant for living far beyond the signal reach of even the tallest rabbit ears has also ensured there's never been all that much to watch.

So nobody is more astonished than I to find that lately our television in powered on for many more hours weekly than the poor thing has ever before endured. The reason? The New House is (supposedly) out of reach of the DSL service to which we have become accustomed and the best remaining option for high-speed connectivity is cable modem. So cable modem it is, and a pricing quirk has provided us with basic (i.e., non-subscription) service and Internet for ten cents a month less than the cost of Internet alone. So, basically, in exchange for allowing the cable company to give us a dime back every month, we let them run a cable down our 800 foot driveway, string it across several trees leading up to the house (including a ginkgo - tree of the poop-smelling berries! yum!), thread it into the house, between two very heavy and fully-loaded bookcases and into our television. So.

So I've been watching a bit of HGTV. I still can't tell all the shows apart - they do kind of run together after a while. But I know now - or rather can admit to myself - that matter what we might have been able to pull off in the Old House, it never would have been transformed into a place in which I would feel comfortable in my own skin. The architecture was all wrong for me, it's aspect entirely too utilitarian, with no charm, no character and precious little in the way of anything house-wise that says home to me.

I feel I can let myself off the hook for feeling as if I had failed to bloom where I was planted. Over the last two weeks I've watched junkyards become formal gardens, 4 inch leopard-print shag carpet give way to golden oak boards, wet basements transformed into swank entertainment spaces and high-end playrooms. But I have yet to see a house with fundamentally poor bones become a comfortable living space. There have been no quick and cheap fixes presented that could have saved the oh-so-red kitchen, no way to put closets in a house with no wall space between rooms or even stories. Basically, I've come to feel o.k. that even if I do possess - as I suspect I do - a lower than average home design sense, that what I had to work with was probably a less-than-average canvas.

As we head into the settlement scheduled for late this week I am at peace. Too much television in the form of HGTV has given me the insight I needed to leave behind the feeling of having failed, of showing a regretable lack of imagination and an inability to feather my own nest, to fashion a lovely (in addition to loving) home for my family.

I am home.