When I was a kid, TV was something we watched at Granny’s house when we went into town. If you’ll remember from last time, I lived in the country without a lot of amenities, so when we didn’t travel down to visit and watch I read. I was an avid reader – still am in fact – for probably no other reason than there were no other distractions.

I was about thirteen when Dad came home with a transistor TV. It was a seven inch (17.78 centimeter) by seven inch black and white model. We powered it with electricity from a twelve volt car battery. TV was never the center of my life, so maybe that made me something of a dreamer. If so, great!

When I was younger I chose truck driving as my career. It always gave me a good living, I got to see the country I live in and get paid for it. I learned to look at each day as a new adventure. It usually was (maybe I’ll talk about that in a future post). Now I’m surrounded by family and home. That’s another good thing – It gives my life balance.

I sure do miss the country, where you don’t have to license your cat and if you’ve got a dog, it can run free. I’ve got a few birds around the house now in a tree out back, but I can imagine a whole forest full of them out there, just beyond. I’m looking forward to seeing them because when I retire, I’m going back.

If there’s one thing I’ve taken from my life that I think other people should know about it’s that I get a lot of strength out of my past, and everything I’ve done, but those things don’t own me. I chose what to take forward when I traded my truck’s keys for an opportunity to make money from home. I chose the good things I picked up, like the ability to concentrate that I got from a mostly TV-free environment as well as an appreciation for nature and new, challenging situations. I think taking charge of your life doesn’t mean leaving everything you had behind. It means being able to choose and keep the good things about yourself and use them as a source of inner strength.

Greetings to the world! I ‘m doing some thing new here and I’m not sure how to begin. I guess I want to tell you how I got to be here. Let’s face it: I could talk about making money from home for ages, but what I really want to do is connect and tell you what kind of person I am so you’ll know where I’m coming from. This is new, so bear with me!

Let me tell you something to start: I like humor. It is something that’s has pulled me through even in some of my life’s darkest moments. Even if my own sense of humor wasn’t up for poking holes in my problems, someone else would make me laugh. I’ve found that even the most serious things have a funny side. Of course there are serious times, but my point is that if you can find some way to  smile you’ve already taken the first step in the right direction. That’s my opinion, anyway.

One thing people get a crack out of nowadays is when I tell them about how I grew up. I am the oldest of a family of seven (three brothers and three sisters) – large by today’s standards. I was raised on a farm in northern Alberta, Canada without the luxuries of plumbing or electricity. Our version of running water was grabbing two pails, running to the dugout and packing it to the house. We were poor as far as money went, but we ate like kings. From our meat to our vegetable garden, all of our food was homegrown. Folks ask, “How could you live like that?” Fact is, it’s easy, as long as you don’t know anything different!

When I got married, we settled on two kids – we decided seven was a bit of a stretch. Three grandkids, a calico cat and the birds in our yard are busy enough, eh? I still think of the country all the time. I like living at my own pace and freedom. That’s what the country means to me now, and that’s what working from home does, too.