Dream house difficulties

Thanksgiving has come and gone without much ado. It's a nice long weekend, but I never considered it an important holiday. In fact, I don't even remember Thanksgivings from my childhood. I get the feeling we just sort of picked it up, cuz everyone else was doing it.

I am, however, immensely grateful. For the roof over our heads and the food on our table. But most particularly for Helena — not just that she's healthy, strong, smiling, and clever, but the fact of her. And the fact of her keeps me humbled and grateful every single day.

I spent my weekend worrying about my dream house. Yes, worrying. And not my dream house, but La Maison de Rêve, being raffled off yesterday.

I became aware of the drawing only once it was too late to buy tickets. I'd finally pulled out the promotional magazine that had been included with my purchase at Les Ailes de la Mode last week. I initially discounted the dream house as gaudy. But then I started to drool. A library. With a mezzanine. A solarium. Home theatre. A massage room. Obscene.

But the worry that possessed me all weekend! The house comes furnished, of course, and I counted four stereo systems. There was not one in the kitchen, which is a problem. But where am I to keep my CDs?

Currently, I keep them all in one place, but our apartment is relatively small and we have only the one stereo. Should I split them up by genre? Store the salsa CDs in the solarium and commit to listening only to classical music while sitting in the library? Or do I supply a cross-section of my collection to each room? Thank goodness I own two different versions of Beethoven's late string quartets.

I suppose I could keep all the CDs together in one central location and pull them out as the mood inspired me. But the house is large. That's a lot of travel time, and distraction, and bother. Or I could acquire duplicates of those most listened to CDs. But this could be costly and/or time-consuming.

How do rich people muddle through these dilemmas? Obscene.