My wife, Fran, and I feel like we have reasonably good taste when it comes to home furnishings and style. Our home is neither palace nor pigsty. But I get the feeling that our daughter, Lucy, who turns 14 this weekend, is passing silent judgment on it and us. And the best evidence of that is her choice of TV shows these days.

Lucy's now an eighth grader at Durham Middle School in west Cobb, and her viewing tastes have steadily evolved as she's grown, from the "Barney"/"Teletubbies" days through the "Full House" years and then on to "American Idol," which she watched religiously for several seasons (and which she, little brother Miles and neighbor Sara Keenum would try to replicate by playing "American Idol" in our living room, taking turns being Simon, Randy and Paula).

Her "Idol" phase waned as she approached her "tween" years and next came her Food Network epoch.

Though she still enjoys watching Marietta's Alton Brown on "Good Eats" and "Throwdown with Bobby Flay," she this summer discovered the Home & Garden Network, better known as HGTV.

Interestingly, she spent uncounted hours watching Rachael Ray and Paula Deen whip up scrumptious edibles without ever evincing much interest in doing any cooking herself, aside from helping her Mom during their labor-intensive annual Christmas chocolate fudge-athons.

Yet after a month or so of watching HGTV, her mother and I think we may have a budding real estate agent or home decorator on our hands. She's glued to the TV watching shows about how to buy a house and how to remake them.

I came home Wednesday from work and she turned her head from the screen just long enough to ask, "Daddy, what's an HOA?"

"That's a homeowners' association," I answered.

"That's what I thought," she said.

The show she was watching was profiling a homely old shoebox of a house in my hometown of Alexandria, Va., that was listed for $525,000.

"That's incredible," I said. "That's twice what most of the houses in our subdivision sell for."

"Yes," she said, "but if they were in New York they'd sell for a lot more than that."

True enough, but how the heck did she know that?

At the top of her list is "House Hunters," in which couples choose from among three properties which one to make an offer on. She's also fond of "My First Place," "Decorating Cents," "Curb Appeal," "If Walls Could Talk," "Income Property," and - get this - "My Parents' House." You guessed it: A show on which offspring not-so-gently suggest ways of updating the abodes of their taste-challenged parents.

"Is Lucy trying to tell us something?" Fran asked the other day.

And Thursday she came down the stairs saying, "This house could use some paint."

Answered her mother, "Well Lucy, if they wind up closing the schools because of the swine flu, then you and I will paint!"

And as further indication of heretofore hidden real estate acumen, Lucy cleaned her parents' clocks during an epic, 13-hour game of Monopoly spread over two days during our family vacation this summer.

Well, better that she watch HGTV than some of what she could be watching. Unlike many kids her age, she's not hung up on TV stars or teen idols - but she sure has a thing for lighthouses. Need to know anything about lighthouses, especially those in Georgia and along the rest of the Southeast Coast? Lucy's your girl.

And she's in love with the digital camera she got for Christmas. She takes pictures of everything, and most of them are pretty good. She has yet to download many of them. Rather, she just deletes old ones to make room for the new. That's an especially good plan after you've just taken 55 pictures of your cat in essentially the same pose.

Our trip to St. Simons was not complete for Lucy until she had taken several gigabytes worth of pictures of the famous lighthouse there at various times of the day and night, and even a few pictures of the directional sign that points the way to the lighthouse. She was so enamored with the paper admission wristband she got during her tour of the lighthouse that she wore it for the next month until it inadvertently was torn off, to her utter dismay, when she and Miles were roughhousing last week.

And did I mention that her e-mail address includes the words "lighthouse" and "Lucy"?

I don't know if HGTV is developing new programs, but if it ever comes up with one that combines buying and redecorating old lighthouses, Lucy will be its most avid viewer.

Happy birthday, Lucy!

Joe Kirby is Editorial Page Editor of the Marietta Daily Journal and author of "The Bell Bomber Plant."