For Sale: A Grand Dream

(Hey look, the topic-o-meter just ticked over to "weird shit you can buy on the internet"!)

About three hours north of This City I Love And Hate is The City That Makes The Rest of Us Scratch Our Heads in Confusion and Mutter About More Money Than Brains. At times, we may even stand with our arms akimbo and wonder aloud about Just What the Hell Is Going On Up There.

Bend, Oregon.

Talk to an East-of-the-Cascades lifer about Bend and you may get a response similar to "Sure, it's pretty, but what. the. fuck?" Because, at some point, a parade of Subaru drivers and other upwardly mobile types "discovered" Bend, and then suddenly people were paying $200K for a dilapidated shack at the end of a dirt road. A "quaint ranch house with a lot of privacy. Fixer-upper. Must see to believe!!!!". Sure. I had a Cadillac once with "water-cooled exhaust" and "keyless ignition".

But Bend has a very interesting little real estate development, and it has been all over the news for the last couple of weeks. The Shire.

This is not just weird. It's sublimely ridiculous and wonderful at the same time. And fucking ballzy of the original developer, I must say. Who could resist a Hobbit-Hole for a garden shed? If I had $800K to throw around, you'd be hard-pressed to keep me out of that place, provided the HOA was moderately reasonable.

You will soon have the opportunity to purchase the entire development when it goes to Public Auction in December of 2008.

Be sure and dig into some of the recent backstory about this place. There are rumors of bank hitmen and unusual "deaths" abounding.

The question is, can you buy this on the internet? Technically, yes. You can't, of course, click a PayPal button and be done with it, but you could probably do almost the whole transaction without leaving your desk except to crap once in a while and grab another Red Bull on the way back out.