Closing Out 2023

It has been nearly a year since my last blog post where I shared the difficulty of 2022 and all the promise that 2023 held for me. And while 2023 was extremely busy and kept me away from the store and the farm for a lot of the time, I am pleased to say that 2023 did not disappoint!

At the end of 2022, I joined a private membership association medical practice to start my own physical therapy practice and continued my work in real estate, all while still working in grocery retail. With the prospect of being able to return to physical therapy on my own terms, I was so hopeful for what 2023 would bring me. I had developed a very strong relationship with God over the previous two years and I felt very convicted that He was leading me in the direction I found myself in. Finding time for the farm and for soaping was very nearly impossible while I worked one job and built two businesses. I made soap in March for a release in April, but could not find time to package the soap for sale. Finally, In late summer I released the soap without first packaging it - a TERRIBLE mistake. This made packing and mailing orders unbearbly difficult and greatly delayed shipping. Despite the unspeakable delays, my amazing customers remained patient and understadning. There were many times I considered giving up on the store. I considered selling my supplies and permanently closing the store. But each time I was about to sign in and close the domain, I would get an email encouraging me - sometimes begging me to hang in there and keep the store open. I am so grateful to those individuals as we approach 2024 and I realize that I will soon be able to return to soaping.

Our medical practice did well in the last year. There is a lot we did well and there is a lot we need to be better at. We recently underwent a restructuring that has resulted in a lot of changes in responsibilities and created new programs in an effort to help build the practice. It has generated a great deal of marketing work for me, but as the primary practice grows - so in turn does my practice. My hope is that physical therapy will once again be my primary income source.

In September I took a leap of faith and quit my job at the grocery store so that I could focus more effort in to growing my practice. It is difficult to build a business when I am spending 30 hours a week at another job. This decision has created a very tight budget in our household, but God has granted me enough real estate work to survive financially while allowing me time to be at my practice. We saw quite a few employees come and go from the practice through our first year in operation and the recent restructuring left us with just five people. This group of women who remain are wholly commited to seeing the practice succeed and have come together to ensure it does. We have no plan B. I am immensely happy to work there. It is a compassionate and supportive environment where the patients are prority.

I have continued to keep my real estate work going and have been very blessed with the right clients at the right time. I have taken great pleasure in helping people buy or sell to realize their dreams. It is at times very stressful and people can become very emotional when so much money is involved, but my time in healthcare and the emotion that comes with that has helped to prepare me for the emotions that often reveal themselves in real estate. This is not at all where I thought I would be in my late fifties, but I am not mad about it. It feels a lot like retirement. I am doing what I want and how I want to do it and I am working for me and not some administrator who puts profits before people.

So what does 2024 look like for me and for Table Rock Dairy? It looks very very good! I have created a business plan for my practice and for Table Rock Dairy and I am completely devoted to both. Over these years of grief and working to find a career and build businesses, I have lost control of my house. Dump piles have taken over. A dump pile is a pile of create of items I don’t know what to do with or don’t have time to deal with. They are things I will get to……. eventually. Dump piles became dump rooms until my house was filled with things that needed to be dealt with. I promised myself every room would be clean and organized by the end of 2024. There would be no more dump piles and no more dust. I would learn to put it away and not “put it down”. If it doesn’t have a home, find it a home - if there isn’t anywhere to find it a home then something has to go. I Began this process in earnest the first week of December and have been unrelenting in this endeavor. As I make my way through the house, I am finding that rooms are once again inviting and relaxing rather than a chaotic reminder of the last 5-6 years. By Christmas, I had my house in complete order. I have mapped out the first 6 months on the calander in 2024 to ensure that I continue to maintain my house; to prioritize cleaning and organizing, to maintain the peaceful feeling that I get from a room that is tidy and clean. I have also mapped out time for soaping and for selling soap. I want to finally give back to my customers who have been unbelievably patient and supportive over the last two years while soap has taken the back seat in my life. I will be returning to making several batches of soap every month, and returning to making more of the intricate soaps that I enjoy. Soap releases will be every other month. Trying to do a soap release every month would be overwhelming, but it will include two months worth of soap ensuring there will be plenty of soap to choose from. I will start soaping in January. Soaps require 4 weeks of curing before they can be sold, so January and February soaps will be released in March to allow curing time for the February soap. The soap release schedule for 2024 is the second weekend of March, May, July, August, October, November and December.

I will also be finding more time to devote to the animals and spending time with them and once again sharing them with you. I have received a lot of emails and messages telling me how much you have missed doing chores with me so I will be bringing that back in the spring. It is hard right now to get out there regularly because the days are short and I am not getting home until after dark. But when the days are longer, I will be going back to taking you out with me to do chores. I will be devoting time to sit with the animals and taking photos to post and share with you. You can only find me on Instagram now since my Facebook was closed after I was hacked. As of now I have not been able to get it back and they won’t let me create a new one. I may go to X or to Tik Tok, but social media takes a lot of time and I don’t want it to pull me away from the soap and from the time working my farm. Instagram is what I am familiar with and I can easily post there without it drawing a great deal of time from the other things I want to prioritize in 2024.

We have had a bull with our cows for several months now and we are hoping for calves next spring or summer. We have several goats bred and expect lots of babies bouncing around and lots of milk for soap and lotion. We are also getting piglets in the spring! We will be raising a few more than we usually do and I am looking forward to that. Pigs are always such fun. I will also be isolating the sebastopol geese in January so that come breeding season we have sebastopol babies and not a mish-mash of barnyard mixes. We will be selling the babies since we already have more geese than anyone could possibly need. The pea-babies will also be sold this year since the numbers of peacocks out number the chickens. So - if things go well, there may not be baby geese or peas to watch, but if no one buys them - there will be plenty given the numbers we currently have.

For those of you that have hung on through what has been the most difficult five or six years of my life, Thank you-Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I am immensely hopeful for what 2024 has in store for me and I am happy to have you to share it with.