Snorkeling Mortgages

Whenever my financial situation threatens to overwhelm me (about every 3 - 6 years), I refinance the house.

This plan isn't working anymore. Ma Maisonette is estimated not to be worth the 20% down it would take for the refinancing.

I also believe that home prices have not bottomed out yet.

I don't want to have an underwater mortgage. I don't want to scuba dive to my front door. Even snorkeling (which I never have been able to do without getting a snootful of salt water) is beyond my capacity.  So this leaves me with the obvious:

- Spend less (a lot less, somehow)
- Try to find a way to make more money without abandoning the very sweet position I'm in right now.

Dr. A said take a vacation? I say, "Fie!" As I usually do when faced with my less-than-joyful financial situation, this morning I made lists of things I can do for free.

• I still have plenty of yarn.
• I recently bought some art supplies. Time to make use of them.
• The bike rack for my car works just fine. And when I inflate the tires on my bike, they'll work fine, too. I just need to hie me to a nearby park and go for a pleasant ramble. Yes, I know it seems silly to drive my bike someplace, but this is Jersey and the roads I would take to a park might prove my undoing.
• The cats! Play with them, groom them, pet them. Hug them and call them George.
• Um...I do write. So write I shall.
• The house! The freaking house! Still not set to rights eleven months after Irene. It. Is. Time.

See? Plenty to do. No, it isn't going to the Borgata and it isn't going to Happy Valley, but it should be recreational. Something to take my mind off my financial difficulties of the moment.

And life goes on.

Py-what-ski?

Pysanki. Say "pea-sunk-ee" for several. Pysanka for one. Also known as Ukrainian Easter eggs.

I've always been a sucker for craft stuff, the more difficult and messy, the better. This one hits 'em all - bowls full of permanent dyes, fragile eggs, a writing instrument that involves heated beeswax and candles, and incredibly complicated instructions.

This is one of the riskier things I've done.

There are four plastic containers of permanent dyes upstairs: the all-important black, yellow, red, and orange. The dye came in tiny wee packets and had to be mixed up using boiling hot water and a teaspoon of white vinegar.

I'm just waiting for one of the cats to go crashing into the cardboard box holding these things on the kitchen counter.

Right now, my hands are smeared with black, yellow, red, and orange dye. Did I mention this is permanent?

I have always gone weak in the knees for this beautiful folk art.

I managed to do very well with wycinanki, Polish papercutting, and one year when very poor, gave everyone a mounted paper cutting. It made me sad when Annushka's husband, Ralph, banished something very much like this from its place of honor in the dining room. (If she doesn't want it, I wish she'd give it back, because I liked it.)

Why I can't take up knitting or something reasonable like that, I don't know. Well, yes, I do. Nice yarn is outrageously expensive and I'd probably do better buying a sweater than making one. My attempts at fancy embroidery have come to naught. And I just don't want to talk about sewing. Besides, I find it unsettlingly difficult to thread and use a needle these days.

Pysanki seems like a cheap hobby. The dyes go for maybe fifty cents a packet. The special beeswax you use to mark the eggs is two bits for a chunky block of it. And everybody has eggs.

There's a different mindset to it, though, an assembly-line quality to it that I know will be a challenge.

We'll see.