June 10, 2014 8.5 Months on the "Without A Job" Scale

Writing Reprieve

Time flies.  It's been a month without serious time at the keyboard.  As a reminder, my son said that I'd fail when I made the commitment to write every day about this post employment journey.  Now that lends itself to the question of when I'm failing if I quit writing every day in total or if I quit writing every day once in a while.  As a parent it's easy to set goals for your children, really logical things like "get an A in every course and I'll buy you a horse."  If your child gets four A's and one B is that really a failure?  It's success on 80% of the tasks and  not really that bad at all.  Perhaps you should get 80% of a horse of simply a less expensive horse or a horse with no riding gear.  To my son, I'd say that I've not failed and I'll still get that horse!

Busy

• My co-conspirator on the the knowledge management project took a job.  I'm still going to pursue this but have to carve out some committed time.
• The online store for the food products is going well.  Items are available at www.yumzar.com .
• For a beekeeper this is the season of high hope and expectation.  The bees are all doing well, except for the colonies that failed to make it through this never-ending winter.  The populations are building up fast.  The late spring delayed the dandelions but they blossomed shortly before the apple trees and clover is right around the corner so I'm feeling good.  I'm focusing on raw honey and am starting to do what is traditionally called chunk honey which is simply a chink of honeycomb stuck in a bottle of honey.  It's gorgeous and a strong selling price.
• Real estate renovation:  ground to a standstill.
• Job pursuit:  I'm going to start looking for the fall, probably October or so.  One of 
• Gentleman farmer:  It's been a summer of broken equipment, dead batteries, etc., but being able to think about things a bit more means equipment and tools are actually where they should be at the right time.
• I had a high failure rate on grapes, especially from last year's plantings.  That's OK.  I simply don't have to do more building of support structures.
• Three quarters of my garden space is in cover crops, simply to improve soil and due to a shortage of time.
• My thirty-nine acre field is in corn and oats.  The renter kind of knows this is his last year.  I'm going to be working the the Extension people to put together a plan for this field.
• Tree planting:  with all the late snow and spring rain it's been a good year for tree-planting and no need to haul water.
• The former gig:  Everything ran well for 27 years.  Last week they had an ERP failure and were down for 48 hours.  The new guy is focused on communication and is said to have done a good job at communication throughout the downtime.  I focused on up time.  If you don't have flats you don't need a spare tire.