OSHKOSH, Wis. - Inside, the coffee is on and the wood stove is burning.

Outside, there is cold and ice.

This is where Jeff Jacobs lives: a 42-year-old, 35-foot houseboat with a dead engine stuck in the ice on the Fox River until spring.

It wasn't meant to be this way.

Beset by financial problems after brain surgery at the MayoClinic, losing his business caring for the elderly and developmentally disabled, getting divorced, losing his house in foreclosure and having his tow boat repossessed, the unemployed 54-year-old subsists on disability payments.

Despite the setbacks, he considers himself fortunate.

"It is difficult to feel sorry for yourself because I'm living in a boat. I'm better off than so many others. I could be under a bridge or in a cardboard box," said the self-described river rat.

When he first arrived at the park dock after towing the boat on the river from Omro, a man who was living in his small car greeted him, saying, "God, I wish I had one of these, and he kept talking and said, 'At least you can stretch out.' "

Jacobs, who has lived on the boat for about a year, purchased it15 years ago at an auction by Rawhide Boys Ranch and had it tied up at his home on an island in the Fox River near Omro. It became his home after the foreclosure.
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