Living Large In Our Little House

Kansas City

We made a trip back to Kansas City last week­end to attend a wed­ding and see my mother in law for Mother’s Day.

Our visit made me real­ize that it just isn’t the lack of jobs that is caus­ing America’s rural towns to die slow and many times for it’s cit­i­zens, painful deaths.

When we moved here, peo­ple would say to us, “The cost of liv­ing must be so much less.”

We knew it wasn’t on an anec­do­tal scale, we knew gaso­line was higher even when prices were lower, as it takes twice as long to drive anywhere.

But we didn’t real­ize how far cap­i­tal­ist com­pe­ti­tion helps to drive prices down in a larger city.

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When we recently vis­ited some of our friends in Kansas City, they proudly showed off their newly remod­eled kitchen. One of the first things she pointed out was her cookie sheet cabinet.

I took a new appre­ci­a­tion for the fact that I was at least smart enough to install one of these in Our Little House.

I don’t care how you plan, there’s always some­thing you for­get in a con­struc­tion project. Our friends down the road even for­got to design a linen closet into their home although he is a builder and they’ve flipped sev­eral houses in their lives.

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Wow! Thank you to every­one who par­tic­i­pated in the com­ments on rais­ing your own chick­ens. Marty is the win­ner of the book, "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Raising Chickens," but even if you didn’t win, you can still get the book here. Marty, you need to email me at fivecoat@​ozarkmountains.​com by tomor­row (Thursday, June 3) at 2 p.m. CST with your con­tact info, includ­ing snail mail address and phone #, or I will have to draw another win­ner.

We were able to leave Our Little House and make a visit home this week­end, to our native Kansas City.

Dale hadn’t been back to the city since November 2008 and I hadn’t been there in a lit­tle over a year. What we learned is that you can go home again, you just have to be pre­pared for it to be different.

I had some research to work on for a cou­ple of assign­ments. We also had lots of plans for this week­end that included see­ing a few friends, tak­ing walks from our hotel, The Raphael, to the Country Club Plaza, and of course, eat­ing at some of our old favorite haunts.

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