Hi Enduring, Thanks for the note. Winter/holidays have always been hard for me. I think the winter blahs just kind of get me down. I definitely felt deflated after Christmas, but I've cheered up since we put all of the decorations away.

I'm a stay at home mom, and I try to keep my nearly three year old busy with inside activities. She's like a polar bear though and never gets cold so when we venture outside in this crazy cold weather I take notice when she says she's cold.

My husband also works from home, and we are living in my DH's grandfather's house. It was originally a one room house built for a farmhand about 170 years ago and then added two rooms later when it became the post office. It has since had about five other rooms added on, and thankfully the kitchen is relatively modern. My DH's grandfather made the birch cabinets. Talk about sturdy. The house is in the 'barnyard' if you want to call it that. My FIL and his brother got out of the hog business last year but still have about 500 acres of corn and soybeans. So I guess working really hard for a month or two out of the year sounds pretty good. They have lots of time for golf which I am slowly learning.

We live near Independence or just NE of Waterloo. I looked on the map and Decorah is supposed to be just over an hour North of us. We too are getting the wintry mix. Eh. We finally sold our house in Kansas City just before Christmas, and I thought I was escaping the ice.

Now that I think about it we did go up to Guttenberg Iowa in the fall to see the lock and dam. I had never seen the Mississippi river, and it was very pretty up there. The rolling hills, trees, and bluffs reminds me of my grandma's house in the Missouri Ozarks. I told my DH we will have to remember the little towns up there like Strawberry Point for when they have festivals.

We're going to build a house in a couple of years because our little old farmhouse has some structural issues. We just sort of put a band aid on it since it was vacant for ten years. We're going to try to build on the farm someplace since I've learned it's good to be within walking distance to a tractor when there is a lot of snow. :)

I'll have to post some pictures of our place. I would like to hear what you have to say about living here, and if your house is next to a bunch of 'farm stuff.' I'm getting used to the house being next to the shop, tractors, old equipment. Maybe they just need to do some recycling next summer. I may have had a more picturesque idea of a yard when I imagined building our house in a couple of years.