Howdy, everyone. We have had light snow yesterday and last night. Not much accumulated. However, we expect some really bitter cold. Luckily we have no where we have to go until Sunday. We are just west of the area under a lake effect snow warning, thankfully.

The banking situation has become more and more interesting as the economic situation has unfolded. Now, it seems, there is a movement to encourage people to move their money from the mega-banks to the small community banks. Take a look at this by way of HuffingtonPost. When I moved here ten years ago I opened my accounts at a small community bank. I left my Bank of America account open because I had automatic deposits set up I didn't want to go through the hassle of changing. (I had the BoA account only because of a series of mergers over the years whereby my original community bank was acquired by successively larger banks until eventually my accounts were with BoA.) BoA had no local branches and very few ATMs so cashing checks or getting cash out was very inconvenient. I closed the account when the automatic deposits ended and transferred everything into my local bank. This bank had a very nice program which provided free (that is, no fee), interest bearing checking accounts without a minimum balance for anyone over 50 which fit me to a tee. I briefly had a credit union account during an unfortunate stint as a teller at that credit union. That is one job I simply am not cut out for. I closed it when I no longer qualified for free checking without a minimum balance when my employment ended. The fees would have killed me. Mom had a similar experience. She opened her account at the same bank I did because it was local but kept her other accounts at another (at that time) community bank to handle her automatic deposits. Then her bank was acquired by a larger bank which did not value customer service. Unlike the BoA in the video linked to above, they did care enough to ask why a long time customer was leaving and Mom told them exactly why.