2024 Life Update

Hi friends, 

I think it’s time for a life update. 

No, I am not pregnant, we aren’t getting divorced and we are still milking cows. So I guess the news isn’t that exciting. Unless you count brain surgery as exciting. It was a pretty big deal for me, but understandable if it’s not major headline material for you. 

On December 5th, 2023 I underwent brain surgery. One day I reached down to pick a cherry tomato and it felt like someone smacked me in the back of the head with a a hammer. I did it again to confirm the experience and feeling the same intense pain, I decided I needed a new pillow. Soon the headaches were happening when I coughed or laid down. But I ignored them, because … I just did. Until my sweet darling germ-infested boys brought home some sort of virus that had me coughing for weeks. It got to the point where I couldn’t handle the pain anymore and I took myself to the ER. 

An MRI and a Neurosurgeon appointment diagnosed me with something called Chiari Malformation Type 1. While the coughing is what drove me to seek medical attention, I had many other symptoms that I thought were normal, signs of being burnt out, or related to having two kids that run me ragged. It turns out, that wasn’t the case. So after a pretty tough surgery, I am now mostly recovered and I feel at least 10 years younger. That’s pretty nifty. 

For over a decade I have had a side hustle doing catering and working as a private chef. I love to cook and feed people and it was a nice creative outlet for me. As we came out of the pandemic and the boys got older I knew my day-to-day needed to change. I stepped back from the daily needs of the farm, added more private chef clients, and joined Babcock House, a co-ed cooperative house on the UW-Madison campus as their house chef. And between writing the first draft of this post and publishing it, I also took on managing a food truck for one of our local restaurants for the summer. I may not pull on barn boots each morning, but I do still help out when I am needed, have a few management areas that I claim as mine, and have my signature on the bank loan. While it might not be what I envisioned years ago, I am happy. 

So that leads me back to here and now. When I started blogging and using social media to share about farming, I was one of very few voices. Today there are tons and tons of farmers on social media sharing their lives and myth-busting. That’s exciting to me for many reasons but mostly because simply put, I did that job long enough and I was burned out. I still want to write, I still want to connect, but I needed a change. For the past few weeks, I have been remodeling this website. Food and recipes are now front and center. I’ve left space for my Humans of Agriculture project, because I love it so much and plan to keep adding stories. My writing about cows and farming is still here, but isn’t the main focus. I will still be connecting people back to where their food comes from but in a different way. 

I sincerely appreciate all of you who have supported what I do here over the years. I hope you’ll continue following along and sharing recipes, stories, and life on and beyond the farm.