Northern Arkansas

Lin and my Aunt Merry are out looking for a car for Lin right now. We just had a nice Thai lunch in Fayetteville, which is only about the size of Ithaca. This is the first time I've been to Arkansas, my potential new home state, since I was about nine. We got to see my grandmother's new house, too, which is just down the street from Aunt Merry and Jean's house. It's very light and has a good amount of room -- she can have an office and a guest room. Everyone seems to agree that she will be happier here than in Missouri or Indiana. The town is really nice and it seems to have a lot of construction/development going on. Merry told me that northern Arkansas has one of the highest concentrations of millionaires per capita (Walmart, Tyson, JB Hunt). She also said that the state is divided diagonally, with the richest people in the Northwest and the poorest people in the Southeast.

The poor part is the Delta part of Arkansas, where I might be. I could also be in Mississippi, which is even poorer. In Northern Arkansas, unemployment is at 2% and they pay people $9/hour to work at McDonald's. In Southern Arkansas, unemployment was over 11% in some counties last August.