Living Large In Our Little House

Privacy on the Internet has been a big topic in the media this week, as well as on social net­work­ing sites. Especially Facebook, where it seems there’s a new alert in a friend’s feed almost every­day about new ways the social media site is try­ing to make mem­ber infor­ma­tion open to anyone.

I’m a pretty open per­son. As a writer, my name is in the pub­lic domain often and I’ve opened cer­tain facts of our lives up in my book about my brother’s life, “No Immediate Threat: The story of an American Veteran,” as well as open­ing up a good por­tion of our lives here at Living Large. In addi­tion, I’m a free­lance writer whose office is also my home, so cer­tain con­tact infor­ma­tion has to be made pub­lic so clients can find me for jobs.

On my social media sites, I accept friend invi­ta­tions from most peo­ple. However, it’s still dis­con­cert­ing to me that social media sites are seem­ingly doing every­thing they can pos­si­bly do to slip out infor­ma­tion to the gen­eral pub­lic that you think you’re only post­ing for your friends and fans.

Then there comes word of this site, spokeo​.com, which lists an alarm­ingly amount of infor­ma­tion about you, your home, job and salary.

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We all have our morn­ing rit­u­als, and our cov­ered front porch allows me to engage in one of my favorites – sit­ting down with a cup of cof­fee, an actual news­pa­per, and my thoughts.
This is one of my favorite places that we built onto The Little House, as well as to the Belle Writer’s Studio.
We weren’t here when the foun­da­tion went in for The Little House and the first thing we learned about build­ing a house from 300 miles away – don’t try it. The front of The Little House is actu­ally sup­posed to be fac­ing the dri­ve­way, with the party deck fac­ing the lake below.
Instead, the cov­ered front porch is fac­ing the woods and while it is sup­posed to be the front of the house, is the last thing any­one sees when they visit.
Having spent the first morn­ing out on the cov­ered front porch enjoy­ing the view of the canopied yard was done was enough to bring me peace regard­ing its cock-eyed direction.

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