Job Run

This blog is ringing all my bells. Tana Butler is pretty smitten with the small farms in the Santa Cruz and Monterey Bay area and she does a good job letting you know why with a few words and a beautiful picture here and there. Thing is, I absolutely loved the area when I was there learning Korean for the Air Force and if Michelle had to choose one place to call home, Monterey would probably be it.

"I grew up on a chicken farm farmed in the old way. It wasn't called organic back then, but it was much kinder to the animals and healthier for the humans too." - Ruthanna, caller on 09.02.20 On Point - 'Writing the Unknown Pakistan'

Someone posted a thread on Ars Open Forum (you'll hear that phrase out of me an awful lot!) this morning where they asked how we would spend a theoretical 'several million dollars' (a couple million invested and one million liquid to re-arrange your life with. Apparently both he and his wife were mid-level Wall St hotshots that got out while the getting was still good and are now settling down to a quieter life.

I'm sure no one has been checking up on this site frequently enough to catch too many of the variations it has already been through, but it's a good thing this isn't a professional project or I would likely be fired for doing all my testing on a production system. Things are slightly more stable now: instead of replacing one CMS with another I'm running three at once with the same content just to play around and see which one I like best.

Over the past few months I have been reading far more frequently that I had been for years. These are the books that have joined my library lately. The stack on the left is what I have read so far and the stack on the right is patiently awaiting my attention. The two in the middle are a bit different, the latest works from two of my favorite authors will make for a nice break somewhere in the middle of all these farm and garden words.

Within the next five years or so I would like to be producing and direct-marketing sustainable, natural, organic, green, slow, local food. I’ll get into what that ridiculous list of words (along with others such as polyculture, permaculture, and rare breeds) all mean both to me and to others as we go along. For now let’s just say that I want to run a small farm and a big garden with a minimum of chemicals and machinery.

With a typical weakness for the grandiose my first impulse is to try and sum up everything this is supposed to be about in one post. Having already attempted to make essentially the same summary in several letters and a lengthy forum post I know that any such effort is going to wind up being far too long to make a good blog post and far too short to cover everything I have in mind. Worse yet I would be so concerned with its perfection that I would put off the writing of it indefinitely. Instead I will make a beginning and from there fill in all the bits and pieces as I go.