I'm also feeling jittery about the prospect of losing my job, so jittery in fact that I've decided to put our house up for sale. My husband and I paid $268,000 for a circa 1920 brick bungalow in Beacon, N.Y., in August 2005, a period that many real estate types now refer to as "the top of the market."

In the four years that we've lived in our two-bedroom home, we've spent $21,000 on improvements such as thermal-paned windows, two new sets of outdoor stairs, insulation, and a deck that replaced a falling-down "mud room" attached to the rear of the house.

That $21,000 figure includes labor for my handyman extraordinaire and the cost of materials.

I redid the kitchen on the cheap, keeping the existing cabinets and installing tile (much cheaper than granite!) to replace 1970s-era Formica counters and linoleum flooring.

The renovation project that I'm proudest of? Finding a solid oak door at an antiques store on Beacon's Main Street that I bought for $75. I paid my handyman $150 to paint, trim, and hang the door. It looks much better than the plastic doors from China that are for sale at the Home Depot.

We currently owe $260,000 on our house. The City of Beacon recently lowered our assessed value from $256,000 to $238,000. Local governments are known for inflating the value of properties on their tax rolls in order to maximize revenues, so our house may actually be worth less than $238,000.

Our Realtor at Beacon's Manor House Realty has advised us to list the house for $229,000. Yes, the bank has agreed to accept a short sale.

I'm sure many people will think I'm making a mistake by selling when we're $30,000 or more "under water" and that I'm walking away from an investment that will eventually come back. But I see things differently.

We will not be able to stay in our house if my income is interrupted or reduced, and the $8,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers that the Obama Administration has in place until Dec. 1 is giving us a window of opportunity to sell our home.

Also weighing on my mind is the upcoming auction of my neighbor's house two doors down. The neighborhood gossips say that he paid $359,000 about five years ago and that the bank has set the opening bid for his house, which is in foreclosure, at $125,000.

I haven't confirmed that, but I assume that if my neighbor's house sells for a fire-sale price, it won't help the already depressed value of our property.

Our story is the mirror image of the previous owners, an architect and his landscaper wife who bought the house in 2000 for $90,000. They rewired, knocked down walls to open up the downstairs, and poured a new basement. Of course, they put in a lot of sweat equity to make their $178,000 profit in five years.

I don't begrudge the "flippers" their profit. However, I envy their sense of timing.

Based on reports from the retail field, however, there are going to be fewer new fall outfits on returning students this year -- whether it's 70 degrees or 90 degrees outside on the first day of school.

The Port Washington, NY, research group NPD reported today that back to school shoppers are cutting spending again this year, but not as deeply as in the fall of 2008, when the financial markets appeared to be in full meltdown.

“Last year we had an even bigger drop-off in spending intentions,” Marshal Cohen, NPD's chief industry analyst, said in the company's report. “So the good news is that the bigger drop off is behind us. And the ‘not so bad news’ is that back-to-school is in line with the current trend of consumers cutting back but not out.”

The league, which had already canceled its 2009 season but was hoping to regroup for 2010, told its owners last night that it had been unable to find any consensus on restructuring the league and was suspending operations indefinitely, according to the Associated Press.

Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, who also owned the AFL's Dallas Desperadoes, told the AP that economic headwinds were just too tough. "I've always thought the game was an attractive game, but we all know when you get the kind of pressure we're in, in these economic times, and then you have an economic model that really doesn't work, then it's not surprising to see it stop play."

It's not just the secondary leagues that are having trouble in the recession. Major league baseball attendance is down more than 5% so far this year, according to www.baseball-reference.com.

Despite the recession, there are those whose dreams of making it in the sports business remain alive. BW's Greg Spielberg recently reported that a new football league, the United Football League will kick off its premiere season in October.

Any predictions for its success? Or the prospects for other troubled sports leagues? Can they ride out the bad times? What do you think?

I've written about this before in a personal blog, but I was quite surprised as an adult to learn that I had been cheated on the lyrics of This Land Is Your Land. I never learned the last verse in school:

In the squares of the city - In the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office - I see my people
And some are grumblin' and some are wonderin'
If this land's still made for you and me.

Since I moved to Beacon, N.Y., five years ago, my appreciation of folk music has been revived by the pleasure of seeing Pete Seeger singing songs like She'll Be Coming Around the Mountain during the Sunday farmers' market.

Lately, I've been thinking about California's budget cuts and the hardship I witnessed while working as a volunteer at The Well in the Desert in Palm Springs earlier this year. I was thinking about writing an omnibus blog entry on California, where personal income has fallen for the first time in 70 years, but instead a folk song came into my head.

It arrived accompanied by music, which is strange, since I don't know how to read or write music. I had to sing my folk song into a tape recorder so I wouldn't forget the tune.

The last time I wrote a song was in fifth grade, so maybe I'm having a Sixties flashback. But I also think songs are a way to reach people who are sick of reading bad news and overwhelmed by blogs, tweets, and Facebook posts.

Here are the lyrics to Got the Golden State Blues, which I've registered with the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP). Even though I'm not a professional musician, I want to protect my intellectual property.

According to the report, 48% of 1,200 consumers surveyed by Javelin Strategy & Research say dining out is the leading area where they have not cut back on spending over the past six months.

Why am I suspicious? Because restaurant meals are the first things to get the axe in my household when times are tough. If I had been surveyed, I would have voted for car repair and maintenance as the area where I haven't reduced spending, despite the recession.

However, that’s not even in the top five areas where consumers say they aren’t tightening their belts. After dining out, the top items that consumers said they were still spending money on include: travel (33%), apparel (32%), pet care (23%), and concert and movie tickets (22%).

What is interesting to note about the survey is that it was conducted exclusively online. Perhaps folks who spend a lot of time on the Internet haven’t been hit as hard by the downturn as those on the other side of the Digital Divide. Or it could be that restaurant meals provide recession-weary consumers with a mini-vacation.

Where are you skimping in your household to make ends meet? For instance, I started noticing a lot more runners in my neighborhood last fall after the financial crisis, leading me to conclude that they had dropped their gym memberships to save money. But maybe moms just had more time on their hands because the kids were back in school. In the ShopDebtFree.com survey, 16% of consumers said they were still spending on gym memberships, making it No. 10 on the list.

Here's the full list of 17 items that consumers are still buying, despite the recession:

I hate to pay for anything I can get for free even if it saves me time. As a result, I've trained myself not to call directory assistance unless there's absolutely no way around it.

This system has served me well for about 10 years. Occasionally, I find the Web steers me wrong as advertisers have "hijacked" phone listings. For instance, the phone number listed on one Web site for Chrysler dealer Healey Brothers in Fishkill, N.Y., connected me to an auto loan company where a tape recording informed me about low-interest rate loans on Chrysler vehicles. (I redialed and got the same result.)

This prompted me to fish around for an old receipt, which had the number of Healey's repair department listed on it. I tacked it up on my bulletin board so I would have it the next time I needed to take the car in for a tune-up.

It's been a while since I looked up a residential number on whitepages.com. Last week, I was surprised when I was asked to create a login with my e-mail address and a password in order to look up my neighbor's phone number. (I could see his name and street address without creating the login.)

This was new to me. I remember being able to view a phone number from whitepages.com on my computer screen without the rigmarole, but it's been awhile since I consulted the site.

I was so annoyed at the inconvenience of having to create a login that I walked over to my neighbor's house and knocked on the door to ask about a power washer that I had lent the family last summer and forgotten about. Maybe that's the silver lining in this story -- the higher barriers to entry on the Web will get us back to human interaction.

I wonder how long it's going to be before I have to plug in my credit-card number in order to get a residential or commercial phone number.

I imagine it will be "subscription" service: All I'll have to do is pay $5 or $10 a year and I can look up all the phone numbers I want. Then I'll be paying for information I used to get for free. That's called a "business model," my friends.

The next time a phone book lands on my front steps, I'm going to pick it up and keep it in the kitchen drawer the way I used to in the last century.

A couple of years ago, I decided to search the Internet for the right piece of stained glass to put in a transom window of a circa 1900 red brick cottage.

I found a great one at a Web site for an architectural salvage firm in Gonzales, Tex. I sent an e-mail asking what it would cost to ship the piece. I didn't really expect to hear back since there are many "ghost" Web sites for companies that have gone out of business. However, the next day I received an e-mail from Brad Kittel, who owned Discovery Architectural Antiques with his wife Suzanne.

Kittel explained to me that I was better off looking for stained glass in my neck of the woods because the shipping and insurance costs would make the piece I wanted prohibitive.

In poking around the Discovery Web site, I became fascinated by Kittel's sideline -- using salvaged materials to painstakingly build "Tiny Texas Houses." The idea struck me as an oxymoron, because of the old saw that "everything's big in Texas."

I wondered who would buy an exquisitely crafted 600-square-foot house for roughly $45,000 and how Kittel and his employees went about building a structure where the wainscoting is made from recycled doors and nearly everything else comes from recycled materials.

I periodically e-mailed Brad Kittel if I thought I might be driving across country, but I never had the leisure to swing deep into the heart of Texas on Route 10, where he is located about an hour east of San Antonio.

However, I became determined to make the trip after reading a story last month about a Brookings Institution study that rated San Antonio as the most recession-resistant city in the country.

In 2007, I imagined that someone might buy a Tiny Texas House and stick it on his property as a guest house or artist's studio. Now, after seeing folks living in tents near the Ontario (Calif.) airport earlier this year, I wondered if Kittel's creation might be the ideal shelter for the downturn.

My husband, who arrived a week earlier, knew something was wrong when the neighbors, whom I'll call the Warwicks, didn't have their annual Fourth of July backyard barbecue this year. He asked around, but no one seems to know what happened to the Warwicks.

The Warwicks had a slew of kids and loved to entertain. They were shrewd enough to invite their neighbors to their backyard parties, minimizing the likelihood of the cops being called if things got too rowdy.

Still, some people weren't very happy when the Warwicks put in a pool two years ago that took up nearly their entire backyard. When the kids did cannonballs, water would splash into a neighbor's yard (not mine).

Now, that pool is filled with foul water. I heard from my neighbor Juanita (not her real name) that someone tried to come empty it, but she protested because the water would have flooded her yard.

Story by Chris Dieterich and Katy Steinmetz

Video by Boris Korby and Angela Chao

"Is this heaven? No, it's Iowa."

In Dyersville, Iowa, at the Field of Dreams gift shop, kitschy slogans on turquoise magnets ring surprisingly true. And though it's not exactly heaven, Dyersville's 4,000 residents are faring better than most of the Midwest during the current economic slide.

By Amanda Kushner and Sarah Koci

For residents of Eldon, Mo., a town of just under 5,000 in central Missouri, the closing of the Lloyd Belt car dealerships has been a severe blow. A town that once had three car dealerships, two owned by Lloyd Belt, is now devoid of the business the dealerships drew. It's also meant a loss of tax revenues and other support the business gave to the community.

I've previously blogged about how tipping seems to be going out of style in California's Coachella Valley. Now, I'm starting to think it may not ever have been in fashion here. What makes me say that?

Today, after getting my car washed in Palm Springs with a discount coupon given to repeat customers, I discovered that my car battery was dead. I pointed this out to man who had just hand-dried my car and whom I had tipped $3. He motioned to me to wait a minute and then reappeared a few minutes later with jumper cables.

After he jump-started my car, I went inside and asked the cashier to break a $10 so I could give the attendant another tip. When the cashier remarked, "Didn't I already give you change?" I explained what happened and that I wanted to tip the employee who had been kind enough to help me.

"There's absolutely no need to do that," she said. "That's not necessary."

I just smiled, walked away, and handed my savior $5. Good service should be rewarded, if you ask me.

By New York standards, I got a bargain. I avoided having to wait an hour for AAA to come jump-start me or the need to call a gas station and pay considerably more than $5.

The other day, when no one else was around, I buttonholed Megan (not her real name) and asked her how her golf job was going.

In typical upbeat California fashion, she replied, "Great!"

I decided to push a little. "Really? My husband works at a golf course and the customers have really been stingy with tips this season," I said.

After looking around to make sure no one else was within earshot, Megan confessed, "Actually, things have been really bad this year. I work the drinks cart and I'm barely making enough to get by. Last year, I was doing great."

Megan has a theory: "Most people go to restaurants on a date or with a group. You can't not tip because of peer pressure. You don't want to look like a cheapskate in front of your date."

According to Megan, it's easier to stiff the gal who sold you a soda or the guy who cleans your clubs because you're usually by yourself when it happens.

I'm not sure about that because golfers often go out in groups. Nevertheless, based on my conversations with people like Megan, it appears that tips are down dramatically this year in the Coachella Valley, home of more than 100 golf courses.

I know that many Californians have gotten clobbered twice -- in the stock market and in real estate. But if you've got $160 for a round of golf, don't you have a dollar for the yoga girl who just sold you a cold one?

Maybe this is a California phenomenon. I'd love to hear from people who depend on tips. How's it going for you?