At the start of my second two week moratorium on reorders. I plan to do this for four months total. First month was painful. But I expect it to get harder and harder as the spring wears on. I will be making 'special orders' for customers, so no request will go unfilled. But anything speculative or experimental is going to have to wait until summer.

The two weeks of reorders each month I do make, is calculated to make sure that inventory holds up, and evergreens are replaced.

I would have been doing something like this no matter what. The outside economy has given me more motivation, to be sure, but I was needing to do this anyway. After five years of expansion, and spending, it is time to consolidate. I pretty much ran out of room late last year, and ever since I've been trying to refine the mix, rather than just buy more, more, more.

Sometime over the next year, I'll need to start renegotiating my lease. I have no reason to believe that my landlord won't treat me fairly -- we have a 27 year history, after all. But, just in case, it would probably be prudent to have less debt and more cash. Which is something I should do anyway. I intend to stay, unless it's impossible. But cash gives me options.

An irony, as always, is that I tend to make actual cash profits when sales are flat or declining. I seem to just be more disciplined and focused.

Meanwhile, also a strange little thing that seems to happen -- I tend to diet during the same months I'm doing tight budgeting. Never consciously, just seems to go together. Getting my own habits under control.

And finally, the following article has made me feel a little better about my disappearing HELOC.

YOU THOUGHT YOU HAD AN EQUITY LINE

Gretchen Morgenson
New York Times, April 13, 2008

"The latest example of this is in the mass freezing of home equity lines of credit going on across the country. Reeling from losses on their wretched loan decisions of recent years, lenders are preventing borrowers with pristine credit and significant equity in their homes from tapping into credit lines that they paid dearly to secure." (Italics are mine.)