Lists

I am big on lists.  To do lists, to read lists, to make lists, to eat, to learn...long term, short term... It's been a habit of mine as long as I can remember.  And I get immense satisfaction out of scratching stuff off of a list: done, eaten, visited, conquered. But as a working mother of two to-active kids I am slowly coming to terms with the fact that I never, ever get to scratch everything off of a list. Life gets in the way.

Working in academics, I don't have to go to work much in the summer.  I entertain kids, take them swimming, can like a long hard winter is coming (despite living in mild NC), fight the annual battle against weeds, Japanese beetles and my personal nemesis the squash borer, try to keep vegetation from taking over the fence line and keep all creatures in my care healthy.  That's a full list, but it would be wimpy to stop there. So I add all kinds of stuff to the list:  read Dr. Zhivago,  learn to make creme puffs, ... and this year's new entry: make a web page and blog for the farm. It's been a big year: we've sold lots of fiber, delivered our and raised 12 lambs, and hatched our own eggs.  People want to hear about this stuff---not because it's necessarily up their alley but because it's a steep learning curve and since we're trained as chemists, not farmers, at times we look like entertaining idiots. But in the end, we usually figure out a way, and we eat well, and we have lots of really soft animal fiber to play with, and does it really hurt anything if there's dog hair and mud all over the floor?