I think if you can save your barn, you should try. It's sad to see barns go. We bought our farm 5 years ago, and have a barn, corn crib, and a few other outbuilding. We are also restoring the house, so we haven't done much to the barn, except tearing down a metal building that the PO attached to the back. The rain was rotting the barn siding where the roof of this nasty metal barn met the old barn. Our barn has good bones, but the skin is just horrible, because the PO just let it go. :( We have to do things ourselves, so my husband just took down a barn that was gorgeous, but the owners (big time farmers) wanted it off this piece of vacant land due to the taxes! :( It made me sick, but luckily, my husband was the one to take it down. He salvaged the siding, and beams and other pieces, and we will use the siding to replace the siding on our barn. I want the barn to remain wood, so this works great. My fil also wanted his gorgeous barn down about 8 years ago, and my dh did that too and kept all the wood. The farmer that owned the barn that my dh just took down, also has 1 more and possibly 2 more that he wants gone, so we are really lucky there. He also has a gorgeous old home with curved top windows and awesome trim, that is need of some repair, that he wants to tear down!! It just makes me sick! Anyway, is there any possible way that you could find a barn to take down and use the wood from that to fix anything on your siding? Then, you will just have to worry about the roof. Good luck with your decision. I'd try everything possible to save your barn though if you can!

"How can you tell if a virtual mobile carrier is as good as their parent?" mtvhike, virtual mobile carriers are neither good nor bad. They sell phones and usage plans and have others provide the signal and the connection. Good or bad: price only. They do nothing else. Two phones on the same system at the same location with different signal strengths? The only difference is the phone hardware. The same could happen with two Verizon sourced (in this example) phones. Take two copies of the same model from the same source, their performances can easily be different when side by side. Keep in mind, the low priced virtual companies like Tracfone tend to offer mostly lower quality phone models and that alone can account for lower quality connections on a major network. crafty, forget the coverage maps other than, again, looking at them from 5000 feet, not with a microscope. I have Verizon, the coverage is awesome and reliable (and has been for a long time, I'm a customer of it and its local predecessors for >30 years) but it can vary from block to block and structure to structure. Why can plans from Tracfone et al be cheaper than the name brand? It's a form of what's called marginal pricing. The big guys need to charge enough with their main business to pay to build and maintain their infrastructure and the anticipated capacity plus a factor for wiggle room. That leaves extra capacity that would go otherwise unused. Their cost for carrying the added traffic sold the the virtual carriers is zero so any revenue is better than none. Ever buy a same day ticket for a Broadway play from the booth on Times Square in NY? Or sign up to be notified for a last minute cruise opening? There are lots of examples of heavily discounted prices when what's being sold would be otherwise unused. In the Broadway case, getting $25 for an unsold $125 seat is better than getting $0.

I'm very much enjoying This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger. Almost from the start it read like an echo of Huck Finn. Halfway thru the book I googled the two titles and this came up: Krueger said that one thing he knew about this book when he started was that he wanted the kids to be on an epic journey, and the journey he thought most about was Homer’s “Odyssey.” For years, local author William Kent Krueger has wanted to write an updated version of Huckleberry Finn. “I knew it would be a story of kids on the river, but an updated version,” he said. “I knew when I wrote the story it would still be in the past, but I wasn’t sure just when.” The multi-award winning author has spent the past three years researching and writing the book, while still working on his Cork O’Connor fiction series about an Irish and Ojibwe private investigator. The result is “This Tender Land,” a story of four Minnesota orphans set in the Depression era, who flee from the Indian school they had been sent to and travel by canoe along the river, connecting along the way with others who are trying to survive hard times. The author wrote in 1st person narrative as the protagonist. It's important to remember that this is his recollection of his youth and that he is now 80 something. That helps to explain how and why his characters, as children, speak and think as much older than they are. However, it puts me off when a six year old - I know the age well - speaks philosophically and uses adult vocabulary. iI takes you away from a really good story when that happens. The racial issue in Huck Finn is also in This Tender Land because one of the four is a Native American. Who had his tongue cut out as a child. He uses very fluent sign language as do the other two boys. This boy, called Moses, is gifted in many ways and liked by all the four come upon. He begins to show his rage at the racism he experienced and others he knew. I give it four stars, one off because of the disconcerting language of an adult coming from children. it has great suspense, which I love. Good descriptions of their world, largely living outdoors and intriguing interaction and relationships among the four. This from Good Reads: In the summer of 1932, on the banks of Minnesota's Gilead River, the Lincoln Indian Training School is a pitiless place where Native American children, forcibly separated from their parents, are sent to be educated. It is also home to Odie O’Banion, a lively orphan boy whose exploits constantly earn him the superintendent’s wrath. Odie and his brother, Albert, are the only white faces among the hundreds of Native American children at the school. After committing a terrible crime, Odie and Albert are forced to flee for their lives along with their best friend, Mose, a mute young man of Sioux heritage. Out of pity, they also take with them a brokenhearted little girl named Emmy. Together, they steal away in a canoe, heading for the mighty Mississippi in search for a place to call home. Over the course of one unforgettable summer, these four orphan vagabonds journey into the unknown, crossing paths with others who are adrift, from struggling farmers and traveling faith healers to displaced families and lost souls of all kinds. With the feel of a modern classic, This Tender Land is an en­thralling, bighearted epic that shows how the magnificent American landscape connects us all, haunts our dreams, and makes us whole. (less)

I've been reading The Gulag Archipelago and have managed to get through Volumes I & II. However, before I tackle Volume III, I decided to take a break to read a couple of "Golden Age Mysteries." Ha! The book I chose first was written by an obscure-to-me author, Annie Haynes, and was first published in 1924. The Secret of Greylands thoroughly confused me! I thought I was reading a Victorian sensation novel along the lines of Wilkie Collins or Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, maybe even Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Everyone was either walking or being transported around the north-country (Northumberland?) in farm wagons, dog carts, or carriages. Then out of the blue a 'motor' (motor car) appeared on a road. The King was mentioned, but the Great War was not. Women still wore long skirts and 'sunshades' (evidently some sort of bonnet, not a parasol or tinted spectacles). I worked out that the time setting must have been Edwardian or perhaps early in the reign of George V before the war. The story was melodramatic, the characters were usually histrionic, and the plot was almost transparent. Still, I kept reading because it was entertaining in its absurdity. The male love interest spent years traipsing Australia, South Africa and Central America on big game hunts and other manly activities. Was he hunting jaguars and iguanas in C. America? It was never revealed. This was a very creepy book, in its own way. I read the notes about the author and learned Haynes was born in 1865. She had some sort of degenerative disease that wheelchair bound her. She was an ardent feminist who lived in London but created her stories mostly from her imagination and remembrance of an earlier age. Her books are said to be a bridge between popular Victorian-Age books and ones of the Jazz Age in the 1920s. She died in 1929 and her reputation faded. Perhaps unjustly, but I really don't think she could ever have given Agatha Christie or Sayers much competition. But if a reader is in the right mood to read a 'real' throwback, Miss Haynes did a creditable job!