Blogs

If you tuned into a news station or scrolled through social media over the past 12 months, odds are it didn’t brighten your day. Looking at the year in review, top headlines proclaimed political scandals, more mass shootings, horrific wildfires and just about anything to do with President Donald Trump.

As Noah said when he went out on the deck to check the windshield wipers, “I should’a brought a raincoat.”

Paul’s day started out with a drum roll. Every morning for months, as he went into the machine shed, he noticed the rusty gate hinge on the door jamb.

It’s Christmas time. ’Tis the season to be jolly. I want all of you to be as jolly as possible. So, naturally, I have some tips to help ya’ll get through the holiday season unscathed.

In 1939, Patrick Kavanagh left his farm in County Monaghan, Ireland, and moved to Dublin to become a writer. When he was young, he would recite poetry while working in the fields or scribble down ideas for his own poems while attending to other farming chores.

As our industry’s main events – such as World Dairy Expo, NAILE, NDB/NMPF/UDIA joint annual meeting, the Dairy Girl Network Forward TogetHER and more fall conferences and events than I can type – come to a close, we gear up for year-end and the holiday season.

Year after year, we listen to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and swoon with wonder at his understanding of the human condition. The three ghosts, Christmas Past, Christmas Present and Christmas Future, come to all of us in some form or another. In the autumn of my life, I am plagued with all three at one time.