Thank you, but honestly, I could not go to school and keep up here without such a supportive husband.
Mike is not as busy with the farm 's production most of the time now, since our daughter took over weekday manager's duties. Our other employee washes the buildings and does all the vaccinating, and assists with pig loadins and loadouts.
Mike does all our repairs (a lot on a dozen buildings) and waste management, and covers when our daughter is off, mostly weekends and her vacations. He keeps the production records....and I take the financials as my responsibility. We share waste management recordkeeping duties. He does the lion's share of the hay cutting and baling the big rounds, she does small squares. They and the hired man do sheep care. We used to do all of this ourselves. .
If someone has to do a property tax appeal, that is my job. If someone has to decide on a repair for a rental house, that is me. If there is an attorney, accountant, or insurance agent in the room, I have to be there. When the mining operation my father initiated on my homeplace went awry, that got dumped on me....four out of the past eight years eaten away with that aggravation.
We are at a point where all the property tax pictures are between general revaluations for 2-3 more years. The mining issues are virtually settled now, with a few years left on our research lease. My little farm next to my homeplace is in five-year programs for wildlife habitat with three years left on them I saw this as a good chance to get away for the farm for a coupoel of years and get some skill adn knowledge I wanted to develop.
The rentals are full for now, and our son takes more and more responsibility for them as time goes on. Our hog business is in a mature business mode, with not as many management decisions to make...or at least plenty of time to work on them if we do.
I have two little commercial buildings to make some decions about as we remodel them this coming year, but that is on a two-year plan right now. One rental house will need some work, and there is a small barn roof I need to draft, to get the boys to figure materials for, but I can do that pretty quickly.
Two of the three kids have gotten their businesses off to a good start. The third one is moving in that direction, which we are working towards now...in the planning stages.
Nursing school is filling in a lot of time gaps that I'd gotten used to in the last few years. Mike was kind enough to hire our employee's wife to clean the house and office every week, so I can relax and enjoy the process there...as much as anyone can enjoy that much pressure! He took over mowing the yard from me a few years ago, when we got the hired man here, which drastically lightened his workload.
I cooked for the first 20 years of our marriage, and he's cooking for the second 20, then we will figure out who does what from there on. I have slightly less than three years left off kitchen duty. He is totally laundry-challenged, so I do that chore.
I can finally enjoy some of my hobbies, helping our adult children with their lives when they ask me to, and doing a few things Mike and I always wanted to do when we were working every day with no breaks. It's a good life...still hectic at times, but not in the same way it used to be crazy-busy.
The only thing that is amazing to me is that I've lived long enough to get this far. I was in such bad shape five years ago, that was not at all a sure bet. Severakl of my cousins checked out at age fifty or so, and I expected to be in their boat. TKD got me onto a different path. I like this one much better....
