what the world needs now

is a little more panic, like i need a hole in my head.

honestly, i can feel it. i'm a germophobe. i live in Texas, which is pretty close to Mexico. some of my neighbors have relatives in Mexico whom they may or may not have visited recently. my kids spend 2 hours a day in a YMCA kid care room.

so i should be all decked out in a hazmat suit and respirator, right?

but somehow, i'm not buying this one. and i may be wrong in the end, this may be all they've hyped it up to be.

i can't help but wonder about the state of the world in relation to how we perceive it. i can't help but hope that the world is in such a messy quandary because we were told it is, and we believed it.

consider the swine flu (or the bird flu, or terrorism, or the economy...etc.) . if there was no television pumping fear in the family rooms of the world, if there was no internet with it's abundance of every sort of information...well, people wouldn't be too worried about all this, now would they?

i want to imagine a utopia where all communication comes from passing travellers and things are slow and simple. i just want to imagine that for a second, ok?

(i'm going to make a confession here: sometimes i really, really wish i lived in Middle Earth. i wish it hard enough that it may actually be a disorder of some sort...)

good grief.

this is my house. the motorcycle is not mine, it belongs to my husband's carpool buddy. note the Blessed Holy Oak swaying in the breeze.

our house is right at 3 years old and we got into it with a sub-prime loan. that's right, our credit was nicht so gut but my husband's income qualified us. we paid $500 and they built the house for us. we got $108 of our $500 back at closing. we felt on top of the world and oh-so-fortunate, like we had really pulled one over on someone. until after our first year when we discovered that our escrow was being calculated on the value of the land sans house and we owed our mortgage company an outrageous sum of cash. they were going to be so gracious as to let us pay off the balance over the course of a year, raising our mortgage payment to $1,700 a month! um, no thanks. so we haggled and got a solution we could deal with and all was well...

then we noticed that a lot of, shall we say...brownies were moving into the neighborhood. disheartening to say the least. in light of the mortgage crisis, apparently our builder decided to waive all sorts of legal documentation in order to keep building houses.

so, we bought our 4 bedroom, 2-1/2 bath, 2500 square foot house for $135,000 almost three years ago. last year's appraised value was $139,000. great, right?

friday i got my appraisal for 2009. my house is now worth $117,700.

(enraged silence.)

and to think we'd entertained the idea of selling and moving up around the Woodlands to get away from the less desirable neighborhood. now i'm doomed to live here and receive letters from the homeowners association about how they don't allow the raising of livestock, namely chickens, in the suburban neighborhood. letters addressing the graffiti problem. and tejano bass drops as the theme music playing in the background of my life.

don't get me wrong, i like my house and there are some decent people in the neighborhood...but being upside-down by at least $12,000 makes it hard for me to see a way out if i should desire one.

back in my renting days i thought home ownership was for suckers and chumps. i'm beginning to re-agree with myself.