Living Large In Our Little House

January 2009 ice storm by Mary Nida Smith

It was a year ago on Wednesday that the ter­ri­ble ice storm of 2009 hit.

Last year, I won­dered what all of the fuss was about in the days lead­ing up to the ice storm. I remem­ber say­ing to our neigh­bors, “You would think the world was com­ing to an end the way they’re going on about the storm on the radio.”

I was used to being in the city dur­ing such storms, even if we lost power, we were still within reach of city ser­vices, within walk­ing dis­tance of the gro­cery and things usu­ally didn’t stay bad for long.

I remem­ber one such storm when I was a kid and it was kind of fun then, walk­ing to the gro­cery store with my par­ents, my dad fell on his butt and my mom and I could hardly run after the toma­toes and oranges rolling down the hill for laugh­ing so hard! We also camped out in the fam­ily room in front of the fire in our lit­tle bun­ga­low, it was more like a party.

I had never seen an ice storm in the coun­try and once I had, I real­ized it was no party.

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This is Lesson #1,056 of live in a Little House and Lesson # 2,468 of liv­ing life in the coun­try. 

We knew when we moved to The Little House that if we didn’t secure our trash, we might be in for some unwel­come wild crit­ters. This is really no dif­fer­ent than the city, where lose dogs might get into the trash.

Not hav­ing a lot of space in The Little House also means we don’t have a lot of space for a big trashcan.

Although we’ve tried to reduce the amount of waste we cre­ate, we still find our­selves need­ing to remove the bag from our lit­tle trash­can under the kitchen sink at least once every two days.

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Congratulations, Kristi! Your name was the one I drew this morn­ing for a signed copy of "Socially Responsible Investing for Dummies." Please email me by Wednesday, January 27 with your con­tact infor­ma­tion. fivecoat@​ozarkmountains.​com

Today's post.….

When we moved, we antic­i­pated the major things – how much we would miss our friends and fam­ily, Dale’s long time job that pro­vided us 4 weeks of vaca­tion (and a salary to take them), even being 10 min­utes from any major attrac­tion or activ­ity our big city had to offer.

What we didn’t take into con­sid­er­a­tion were the small things, such as find­ing a good radio station.

We’re big fans of music – Classic Rock to be exact – and since we’ve lived here in the Ozark Mountains, we have had a time try­ing to find a radio sta­tion we enjoy.

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Happy Friday, every­one! Although I'll be work­ing through the week­end, the end of my reg­i­mented week is almost over. Today, I have Ann C. Logue, author of "Socially Responsible Investing for Dummies" answer­ing some ques­tions about her book.When Dale and I opened our IRA, I was con­cerned about some of the com­pa­nies we would be invest­ing in.  Our finan­cial advi­sor didn't have a whole lot of answers for us, but I'm bet­ting Annie's book will help us do it bet­ter the next time. When we have money to invest again, I hope to be a lot smarter about money and more aware of where my invest­ment $$ are going.

Annie is the author of three books in Wiley’s “For Dummies” series. She has also writ­ten for Barron’s, Newsweek Japan, and BusinessWeek Chicago, among other pub­li­ca­tions. She is a lec­turer in finance at the University of Illinois at Chicago and her cur­rent career as a writer/author fol­lows 12 years of expe­ri­ence as an invest­ment ana­lyst. She holds a B.A. from Northwestern University, an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago, and the Chartered Financial Analyst designation.

Click to the next page for my short inter­view with Annie and learn how you can enter to win a signed copy of her book.

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