What have I done?

This will be my last Friday newsletter for a while. Try not to be distraught.

When I first migrated my writing to Substack, I promised to publish once a week on Tuesdays, and on Fridays if I could. I gave myself that leeway because I dislike setting goals lest I utterly fail at them. I can’t handle the pressure, even if it’s only me creating it. Ben is, unsurprisingly, the exact opposite. He never met a goal he didn’t instantly fall in love with. The more, the merrier. Stress? Bring it on.

But now I’ve done a thing I can’t get myself out of. I’ve committed to writing a book and I’ve signed up for a course to help me do it: “A Book in Six Months” (with Ally Fallon), which means exactly what it says, that I will write a book in six months. It will be a long way from finished in July, but I will have a first-draft manuscript in my hands. Thank you to all two of you who have asked me to write it. I am terrified.

In yesterday’s first coaching call, Ally told the 75 of us in the class (including one famous person whose books I have read) that statistically 80% of us would finish our first draft and I am sure I was the first person to assume I would be one of the failers. Why do I do this?

I’ll tell you why. It has taken me a lot of years of observing my self-sabotaging ways to understand that I hate goal setting because I want an up-front guarantee of success. Wouldn’t that be nice? Ben says it would take all the fun out of setting a goal, but I think it would just take the stress out, and as usual, we are opposite opposite opposite.

So now that I’ve said all of this out loud and in public, I can’t go back. But I also don’t think I want the pressure of writing an actual book plus two newsletters a week here, so I am cutting back to one a week, on Tuesdays, from now until July 3. Thank you for your gracious understanding.

Word of the year

Which brings up the next topic: a word of the year. Have you done this before—chosen a word that will help you focus on something you want to manifest in your life for the coming year?

I have chosen one before and honestly, it hasn’t been much of a help to me. It’s not much different from a resolution and those have been all but worthless. I typically forget about it by February. But by the end of this past December I was so mentally and emotionally exhausted with 2023, I decided to make my word for the new year rest. I was going to order a little necklace and have rest engraved on it to remind me to make time to rest my mind and body. Of course it made perfect sense to then sign up to write a book in six months, so I did that too.

Then Daddy passed and I became briefly obsessed with the word perfect, since he spent my entire life telling me I was that, but how do you make perfect your word of the year? I thought I could have rest engraved on one side of my necklace and perfect on the other side and that would be perfect rest, and isn’t that a lovely thought? But it wouldn’t do much for my book.

Then, considering I’d signed up to write 65,000 words that all go together nicely in half a year, I thought I should make my word write, like a command, as in, get your behind in the chair and put some words on the screen and next time don’t bite off more than you can chew. But that feels like a cruel taskmaster standing over me with a whip and that’s not the vibe I’m looking for.

So maybe there won’t be a word of the year for 2024. Maybe the other 65,000 will have to do.

The farm

And finally, a little farmly update.

When I get stressed, I like to go outside and visit the cows and check out the state of affairs in our Red Sea of Mud. This is the time of year when the bred cows begin to really look pregnant.

Jasmine, a heifer, pregnant with her first. She is not due until April, bless her heart.

While I had the hose filling water tanks, I was spreading out hay over the Sea of Mud. This is our attempt to keep the yard from washing into the pasture and maybe grow a few blades of grass. Ben had rolled out a few bales last week, but there were spots where it was too thick and others that were bare. This is what we do to pass the time while filling 700 gallons’ worth of water tanks.

All eyes were on me. It’s not that they don’t have enough hay on their side of the fence. They just think my hay must be better than theirs.

This black steer is 31, but we call him K42 because that’s what his tag number was when we got him. The 31 is for our record keeping only. The little white girl is obviously Sugar Pie, my favorite. Not everyone gets a name around here.

Now that we are actually living in the house, we have big plans for the garden this year. Last year we had a couple of beds by the barn and had limited success with them, mostly because we were too busy building shelter to grow food. Don’t we sound like regular pioneers?

This year the beds will all be near the house. We are also repurposing every available container as a raised bed, which includes a couple of cracked water tanks. Ben filled one with dirt a while back and I stuck it full of American garlic cloves. We didn’t see any sign of life for a long time, but yesterday I saw this:

Yay for me! Now it is all safely tucked away for winter under a layer of hay that I’ll remove when it begins to warm up in spring.

Ben also retrieved this very old wagon that was buried in brush when we bought the farm. The tires are dry-rotted and the wood is in bad shape, but won’t it make the cutest little raised bed with carrots or beans and marigolds in it?

As you can see, we have a lot of work to do, but stay tuned and maybe we’ll grow some fun things this summer that don’t include words.

For now, let’s go write a book.