As I have told you I have been in the process of refinancing my home. After hurricane Floyd, because we had no flood insurance (we were not in a flood zone), we got a disaster assistance loan from FEMA to help us rebuild. As a result of this we were consistently "upsidedown" with regards to equity since 1999 which made refinancing our high interest mortgage impossible. Recently I had vinyl siding put on the house and figured that perhaps the value might have increased enough that we could refinance our high interest mortgage. So we had the house appraised. And guess what, it just appraised at TWICE what we paid for it in 1991. Not bad going for 14 years. I would love to hear of another investment where you get 100% return on your investment over the course of 14 years. I had always been taught by my mother that if you were going to spend money on accommodation, always spend it on a mortgage as opposed to lining a landlord's pockets. (She recently sold a house, which she bought for 4,000 british pounds for 65,000 british pounds) When I first moved here my husband wanted to rent a small apartment, I insisted on buying a house (I think he objection to a house had more to do with having a lawn to mow than it did anything else). I think that right now my decision has been proved to be the right one. Not only that, but while it appraised at twice what we paid for it, with the current market in this area, with there being more buyers than sellers, and a shortage of single family houses, houses are not only selling above appraised value but are selling at much above LISTING price due to the desperate buyers out-bidding each other for the few and far between houses that are on the market which according to a story I read today go from listing to sale in TEN days. I know people are talking about a "bubble" in other areas of the country, but here the "bubble" has only just (in the last two or three months) begun to inflate. Who knows where prices will go? Don't stuff your pocket full of rent receipts, stuff your house full of equity, it is well worth the money. Finally factor in that we are about to receive an influx of 3,000 more marines to Camp Lejeune, (with all their dependents) and who knows what the market will do? Way I look at it, I am refinancing my mortgages and paying off all of my other debts and I STILL have equity in my home. Can't beat that. As Lex Luthor said in Superman "stocks may rise and fall, banks are no damn good but people will always want land" (or something similar to that) smart man that Lex Luthor.

It occurred to me today, when I was filling my empty bird feeders (much to the relief of the impatient birds) that in the coming months there is going to be a backlash against wild birds because of the bird flu problem. I would like to make a small, but very important point about SARS. When the SARS virus first surfaced there was a rabid frenzy in the press as to how SARS was going to ravage the entire planet and there were photos of people walking around the streets wearing face masks in an effort to ward off the virus. As it was SARS fizzled and nothing really ever came of it, I see the same for bird flu, but what worries me is that in the interim millions of birds are going to be slaughtered needlessly, all in an effort to eradicate a disease that is not going to effect the majority of the population at all. We, as rational human beings have to guard against this, we must insist that mass slaughter of wild and domestic birds not be allowed in an irrational cleansing of a species. Birds have never posed a threat to human beings and the irrational press cannot be allowed to posit that they now pose such a threat. Just as last year's "pet threat" was shark attacks, this years "pet threat" is bird flu. Do not let the irrational press manipulate you into the frenzy. Birds are too precious a gift to this earth, we cannot, in all conscious allow them to be slaughtered because of an irrational fear, to destroy such beauty would be a crime.

Every now and again you come up against a force of nature. Such is Cueball. When he first arrived at our home he was a cute little bundle of white fur with feet the size of meat plates who really didn't know how to take Judy our other boxer. As he has grown, and grown, and grown and GROWN, he has become such a force of nature that you do not control him you simply just manage to observe him, with a bizarre sense of wonderment. Cueball will run into the side of buildings, run into large imovable object like concrete bird baths, run into delicate objects like human beings, the fact is that Cueball when he is running, thinks not for what he is running in to, he thinks only that he is running. Oh and while I am at it, he is the only dog I know that can go out into a garden that hasn't seen rain in four weeks and can somehow find himself a place where he can get covered in mud, I do not know how he does it.

(while I am on a roll), don't you just HATE, and I mean HATE, those people who have those head attachment things which means they don't actually have to have a cell phone in their hand to be carrying on a conversation. This phenomena annoys me on two levels. a) If a person has to walk around all the time with some sort of hardware attached to their head it appears to be done for two reasons 1) I am so cool I have the latest technology, I have a cellphone attached to my ear 2) I am so important it is vital that my cellphone is attached to my ear every waking moment. Personally I can't look at them without thinking of Uhura from Star Trek. Come on people do you HAVE to be so "connected" and has a person's laziness got to be so profound that they cannot 1) look at a cellphone to see who is calling 2) answer the cellphone 3) put it to their ear and speak? The second thing that annoys me involves the grocery store scenario of which I had spoken before. This evening I was in the grocery store, there was a woman, in the salad dressing aisle, who appeared to be having a very deep and meaningful conversation with the Kraft Thousand Island. She talked and talked and talked and at one point I thought to myself "well I always said it was a mistake to clear out the mental hospitals the way they did" it wasn't until I got to the other side of her that I realised she had one of those Uhura devices and was having a cellphone conversation. This happened to me before, I was at an herb and plant show at a Plantation, and a very pleasant afternoon it was, as I was wandering around looking at plants and herbs I came upon a woman who was, apparently talking to a tree, she was facing the tree and was having a quite spirited conversation with it. Turns out she was on a Uhura cellphone, which I realized before I called the police to have her taken away in a white van. In any other time a person wandering around a store or any other place in the world having an apparent conversation with an imaginary being would be carted off and injected with large amounts of drugs. My point is (HA YOU KNEW I WOULD HAVE A POINT DIDN'T YOU) how the hell do WE know that these people are actually having conversations? We don't, for all we know these people are having imaginary conversations with someone to make themselves look important, we have no way of knowing if there is actually someone on the other line, so while we are listening to "tell the client to fax the contract to Zurich and then wire the 10 million at the same time" what is coming back from the cellphone is "you're service has been temporarily disconnected, please call customer service for further support".... pah Finally, having an Uhura cellphone attached to your ear does not make you look important, it does not make you look impressive, it does not make you look wealthy, it makes you look like a lazy, technology obsessed, obsessive compulsive sufferer.... stop, sit, smell the bloody violets for gawds sake.

So my house is being appraised on Monday so I have spent most of the day cleaning everything that isn't nailed down and painting everything that is. I am hoping that my efforts will pay off when it comes to the refinancing of my house. I have, however, a constant battle against cobwebs, which for the most part is due to my absolute refusal to kill spiders. I like spiders, I know lots of people don't, and I understand that, but personally I like them, they are harmless (unless you are talking about a black widow or a brown recluse) and are extremely useful, they eat bugs. To further exacerbate the problem I have a) cathedral ceilings in the living and dining rooms and b) a second floor which houses the guest bedrooms and bathroom which as my husband and I live on the ground floor almost exclusively are never used unless someone comes to visit. So today I went upstairs to check on the bedrooms and bathroom and make sure nothing needed to be taken care of up there, I opened one door and it was like a scene out of a horror movie, where you see hero or heroine grabbing handfuls of cobwebs in the obligatory haunted house. What amazes me is what the spiders up there eat, the windows and doors are closed, there are no bugs up there, are spiders like supermodels that can exist on drugs and crystal lite? AND if the cobwebs are not the result of spiders then what are they the result of? I know that our forced air form of heating and cooling have some effect on this but heavens, I swear if you sit still for more than 15 minutes in my house cobwebs will grow on you. So I spent my day scaling cobwebs and evicting spiders (I will evict them to the outside but I will not kill them). Tomorrow, praise Mother Earth it is officially Spring, and my garden spider eggcases will be hatching and my garden spiders will return, and hopefully all these spiders living in my house will decided to move outside. One can only hope.