Again the evening grows long and I am the only car in the huge lot at the school. There is no herd of pigs this time, but the sounds are first rate. The usual cricketish frog background from the slough pond. The perfectly classic sound of an owl’s Who?oo? And in the courtyard, there are two other raptors conversing in a tit for tat fashion, but a very anti-classical and even weird grackling rachet.

I would not have known they were raptors except I saw one finally flitting to a better tree, and it was too huge to be anything else. Some sort of hawk most likely.

I turn from the sound as it fades down the lot and break back into the temporarily abandoned building with my key. In the hall I feel a rind around my mind, and that phrase leaps into existence. I am here for working things, but mainly to thrash out a strategy to free up some money on a monthly basis. I’ve put it off and off and circumstance has enabled my procrastination–one of the cards involved has a hold on it for being used in some non-standard wan (i.e., I was shopping online with it a week or two ago).

In the end I reckon that the best I could do would free up about another $200 a month, at the price of doubling an interest rate and tripling the time it would take to pay off the chunk.

Which doesn’t feel like a great deal, or even enough of one to justify. Better maybe to suffer the largest pain point to the tune of a week’s wages per month, for the next sixteen months.

There’s a second middling way around and that’s to refi the northern compound and pull a bit of equity to soothe the parched budget with. Like running the principal back up another 10K, but that cushion costing four percent instead of ten like the part of the cards … eh. I don’t wonder at the rind, even as I find a way through it this minute with a good knife in the middle of the reverberating darkness.