Time to Catch Up

It's been too long since I've updated this blog!  Sorry to all of you who have been watching and waiting. I will try to do better.

2012 has been a year of changes and lots of new things. Mostly for the good and some very sad.

We started the year making a commitment to host our first ever Boer Goat show here in Chehalis, WA. We set the date for July and called it The Big Top Boer Goat Show. Many shows have several buildings or areas assigned for the goat pens and the show ring. Communicating between these buildings during the show can be challenging. The Big Top was all under one roof.

Here is a picture of the goats in the show ring. We brought an IBGA show in, maybe a first for WA state, and many great farms agreed to show with them. The feedback says they liked it so we'll repeat that again next year.

Our farm was also invited to the Four Star Boer Goat Production Sale this year. We brought seven goats to the sale - 6 does and 1 buck. All but one doe was sold! It worked out well for us and gave us a new perspective on production sales. Every experience is a good when you can learn something.

The doe we brought home as unsold happened to be the one that Joe didn't want to sell. I think Someone was looking out for him. Her name is Snowdrop. She is sweet and definitely one of his favorites. Her sire is a beautiful spotted buck we owned for awhile this year so she should give us colorful kids in 2013.

We got out to a few shows this year. We showed at the Wild West Show in Yakima, WA; Red, White and Boer in Ridgefield, WA; The Big Top Boer Goat Show here in Chehalis, WA; and Joe hauled our Jr. buck and his sister to Walla Walla, WA for the Octoboer Fall Finale.

Overall our biggest winner was a buck born here in January, Kindlehope Mojo Blitz.

This picture is of him at the Octoboer Fall Finale at 9 months old. He placed 4th at the first show and 3rd at the second show in a class of 15 competitive bucks.

Earlier in the year, he placed 2nd in a class of 18 great bucks and earned his first ABGA points.

We're pretty happy with this boy.

We filled our pastures again this year with 60 jumbo Cornish Cross meat chickens, 16 holiday turkeys and 2 Hereford steers. We have many repeat customers and selling the poultry and beef is easier these days.

On the sad side of the year, we lost a very dear friend in October. Valerie Witt was my farm Mentor, especially when it came to the goats. When I first started buying Boer goats we joined forces. She was putting her herd together at the same time. Spending hours in the truck driving up north past Seattle or down south into Oregon in search of our starter herds gave us time to talk and share and form a valuable friendship.

In all honesty, she felt as close to me as a sister. To say I am going to miss her is a huge understatement. Valerie was a very special woman and friend to many people. Her family is dear to us. It feels tough to move on without her and hard to think I can't pick up the phone and call her. She is and will always be deeply missed.

This picture is one of those times when we were goat shopping. She bought this little doe and I bought my first buck. My grounding in farm life came mostly from her gentle guidance and long phone calls.

A New Year (1/9/2009)

I'm going to ask you to bear with me on this entry. Although this blog is dedicated to what it means to be a city girl moved to the farm, I'm going to focus for just this one entry on just being me.

This time of year always inspires deep desires for time management. Perhaps that is part of the harried city life I lived. Where every moment in my job was accounted for in fifteen minute increments and only deemed worthy if it produced money for the company I worked for. It sounds bad but I did get paid for it, and paid well.

But the case of time management frenzy I get this time of year goes a little deeper than that. As does the desire for setting goals for the new year.

Interestingly, when I think of goals in January I think most about my writing goals. Household goals, farm goals, and even sadly, spiritual goals all slide to the back burner, or in the country, are piled somewhere behind the barn.

This happens mostly because with the coming of a new year there is the marking off of yet another birthday within the same week. Birthdays, especially those within the higher number ranges, always bring reality.

Although I do not feel it in my heart, time is ticking away in my body and my mind. I am growing older and with growing age comes a growing fear that I might not accomplish in my life what I believe I was born to accomplish.

In order to push that fear aside I turn to organization and time management. Believing in the power of these things to bring about amazing results. My fingers fairly itch to pull out a fresh new daytimer and to fill in all the empty lines with precise plans on how, this year, I will finally achieve something important.

There is only one good thing about this compulsion. For a moment when I am setting goals, I am not looking back in my life, I am avidly focused on looking forward. Outside of that, all my carefully written plans are a futile effort.

Within a week all the rigid walls confining the minutes of my days, carefully written in clear pencil (with the 0.5 mm lead), give way to the terrible reality of my predictable humanity. I ignore them and I live. One day at a time. Whatever is given to me each day. Life happens.

I guess this means that I am not meant to be a powerful woman who sets aside life's twists and turns and, more troubling, its commoness, to live a life of precise, single-vision achievement.

This January however, I know that however glorious a life of achievment appears each January, it is just a mirage. One I imagine up to chase away the panic of growing too old to achieve anything useful.

So, I won't do that this year. I was ready to. I had my pencil out and full of lead, I had a notebook to record all my wonderful goals. I was going to map out the incredible steps I would take this year down the path of achievement and, lets face it, the all desireable glory.

Instead, at 53, I'm going to simplify things. I'm going to redefine achievement. I'm going to rejoice in some already achieved achievements. Because now that I've slowed down and begun to reorganize my thinking, I've noticed these really cool achievements lurking on the fringes of my yearly panic. They are:

1. I am loved eternally

2. I love eternally

These achievements are irreversible and they are, simply stated, enough.

Especially for a life that was given for years to the despairing belief that this would never happen. But it did. Miraculously so. And it stands as a testimony that sometimes despite our lack of detailed day planners, the overwhelming busyness of life, and our boring commonness, we have achieved a great deal more than we give ourselves credit for.

Furthermore, I am determined to believe that without having achieved these two things first, accomplishing anything else would be meaningless, if not impossible.

So in view of this and without one pencil mark of planning, 2009 is going to be a good year.

I believe that 53 is going to be incredible and not too old to be even more incredible.

And that what is yet to come is a bonus when added to what has already been achieved.