I’ve looked at some really bad property over the last few months, but the one I looked at yesterday took the absolute cake. It didn’t help that it was a half hour outside of town going the opposite direction from my current home, so I knew at the outset I was adding at least an hour to that day’s commute. It didn’t help that the snow made the dirt road and the gravel driveway leading to the property nearly impassible. It didn’t help that the realtor was popping Zoloft from a bottle she kept on her dashboard – not kidding. It wasn’t good to find three dead mice and a urinated on carpet inside the home, too much pee for three mice to accomplish. The missing exterior wall on the den – just some propped up ply wood – was cause for concern. However, the real deal breaker was the view. The house has two decks with railings half the height of railings that are up to code, both of which face a rolling slope down to the Missouri River. Directly across the river from those porches, one of them coming off the master bedroom, there is the unmistakable concave form of a nuclear reactor; the telltale coolant steam rising with the wind to drift gently toward town. My own reaction to the reactor was bemusement while the realtor said philosophically, “That reactor going bad is the least of my worries. I stuck my head inside it once, and it seemed fine.”