Out With The Old, In With The New

Blogging at night seems to be growing on me... I think this is when all my writing juices are flowing, so even though my eyes are getting droopier and droopier, my brain seems to be getting perkier; or at least filled with a bunch of garbled paragraphs that I feel I have to write down. ;) I keep on telling myself I need to get a small notebook next to my bed, because it's usually around midnight that I will suddenly sit up in bed, with a grand blog post idea! I'll have it thought out perfectly, and it's such a fabulous topic, everyone will love it!! Whoohoo, aren't I grand?! 

Then I've forgotten it by morning. [smacks forehead]

Where was I going with this? Night time blogging. Yes. It is night time right now... Okay, maybe my brain isn't quite as perky as I thought...

My clock says that it's 10:05pm. In exactly 1 hour and 55 minutes, we will officially be in 2012 (yeah, you East Coasters beat us to it; don't rub it in). 

I realize that my video I made is really quite mournful, but seriously, that was my year. If I had to size up all of 2011, I have to say I am leaning towards calling it a rather crummy year. A lot of good things still happened, but the scales are tipping on the not-so-great side. I sold my cow. My garden failed. I lost six goats. We sold our chickens. I lost friends. I was depressed a lot this year.

But good things happened right along side of the bad. I taught my first workshop. I got past the first stages towards the Polyface internship. My knitted animals are selling like crazy. So is the goat milk soap. I started my first book. I started a yarn CSA. I raised and butchered 50 meat chickens, and sold them to customers. I got rabbits again. My neighbor asked me to farm her land (98 acres of good soil). 

Looking at these lists, it seems like 2011 was actually a pretty good year. But it doesn't feel that way... My head says one thing, and my heart says the other. I'm learning that sometimes the heart knows best after all.

But gloom and doom aside, I am REALLY excited for 2012!!! To quote my blogger friend over at 'Barn Talk' (look on my blog list, on the sidebar for it), I think 2012 is going to be THE YEAR. The year when things start moving. The ball starts rolling. 

I've come up with a list of things to do, should I not get the internship, so I think no matter what, this is going to be a busy and productive year. But believe me, I am going to do my absolute best to get an internship position. If I don't get it, I don't want it to be because I didn't work hard enough; I want it to be because someone worked harder than me. If I give it everything I've got, and another girl gets my place, I will feel that she was worthy of it, and I shall take a leaf from her page and work all the harder from then on. We'll find out in the beginning of February what the verdict is...

But what DO I want to do this year? Hehe, here's a list. This list doesn't mean everything on it will happen this year, but it's a list of priorities. Things I would love to see happen.

• Go the the Small Farmer's Journal Auction. 
• Get a pair of bottle baby Boer wethers to train as a draft pair.
• Attend Grape Lane Poultry Farm's "One Quarter Horse Power" workshop. How to train and use a saddle horse for draft! Not only could I use that knowledge for horses, but I could use it for the draft goats as well.
• Teach more workshops! I am chomping at the bit to get more of these going. :)
• Work with a local cheesemaker and learn the intricacies of the art. Making goat milk tommes are what I would love to learn...
• Start getting some articles published! I send in article submissions to magazines every now and again, and while they usually turn out well in one way or another, I have yet to get something published for real. That will be a glorious day for me when I see my name at the bottom of an article in a magazine... [happy sigh]
• Get more goats!! LOL. I need to get my herd numbers up before next breeding season (see? I'm already thinking ahead!).
•  Go to Ireland? Hey, don't laugh; I could do it if I wanted to... I have plans up my sleeve, but I'll play my cards when the time is right. 
• Try and finish my book! That's a good goal, right? 
• Anything else I can think of. :)

Bring it on. 2012 is gonna' be a good year. I'll make it be one.