My Kingdom for a House

Mitt Romney has six houses.

What in the hell do you do with six houses?

I live in Arizona, and I can just barely imagine having two houses. One in the southern part of the state for winter, and one in the northern part of the state for summer, and roughly splitting one's time between them. Given that this week, before the monsoons started, the temperatures in Bullhead City and Lake Havasu were 121/122 degrees, I can easily see how having a summer home might literally be the difference between life and death.

Still, even that evokes possessing a wad of cash I don't think I'll have in my lifetime.

But...six? Supposedly he has two homes in Boston. Two? Did either Mitt or Ann, or both, not want to bruise their exquisite manicures by driving so far one day, and just decide to buy another house?

Two vacation homes on New Hampshire lakes? Did they ever hear of the old-fashioned concept called "motel rooms?" Or even "vacation rentals?" But of course, the yacht would have been missing its separate gold-plated residence, and maybe Rafalca would have been kicking down the walls of her too-small (normal-sized) stall. Those are adequate reasons to buy another half-million-dollar lakeside vacation home, I'm sure.

Furthermore, how do you plan for the logistics of moving between six houses? Do you wake up in the morning and say, "My tummy hurts, so we need to go to the house in La Jolla?" Or do you notice that a flake of snow might've fallen in Utah, and take off for the ski lodge? (Which might be a pretty rare thing, once climate change really takes hold.) Do you own six separate sets of clothes, bedding, towels, and cookware, so each house is furnished identically to the one you just left, and you don't have to worry about finding your favorite tea mug, and can slide right into your best suit? Do you have six sets of books, CDs, DVDs and Netflix subscriptions, so you can have your favorite music and comfort reads, and don't miss your favorite TV programs? Do you have six iPhones and six iPods, and six laptops, one for each house, with identical programs, and music and documents all linked through the cloud? Also, what happens to the food in each refrigerator? Do you pack it up and take it along (although that sounds horribly common, moving your food along with you when you can just buy more). If not, who cleans out each refrigerator after you leave? For that matter, who scrubs the toilets, winterizes the homes if you're not there, waters the plants, washes the windows, maintains the landscaping, locks the doors at night, and leaves the houses in perfect pristine condition so you can come through on your brief sojourns, take a deep breath and look around, and say with a sigh of satisfaction, "This is my home?"

I'll tell you who. Those invisible underpaid servants you never see (also known as "ordinary people"), because you're running for office, for Pete's sake.

I have as much in common with Mitt Romney and his merry clan of arrogant moneybots as I do an alien species. Maybe less.