Discouraged

I'm feeling really discouraged lately. I keep experiencing so many pointless little glitches to everything I attempt that lately it seems like I can't successfully accomplish even one simple task during the day.

One of the people who supposedly was sending me a deposit on a horse two weeks ago seems to have vanished off the face of the earth, with no check ever delivered. Money issues are scarily bad. We're out of hay. We were supposed to get a new load delivered today, but the people never showed up, so the broodmares had to go hungry. The hay people have said the load will be here first thing in the morning.

Ken figured out what was wrong with my computer, fixed it, and set back up in my office. I went to start work this morning, and voila---no network connection, which means no internet, which means, once again, I can't do my work from my own computer and have to wait to use Ken's. Ken looked at it briefly and couldn't find what was wrong, but he had his own work stuff to deal with today and didn't have time to figure out my problem.

So, I figured I'd do one simple thing: send out a horse sales list to someone who said they might know someone who'd be interested in one of my horses. I spent an hour looking for the sales list among the files Ken had transferred from my problem computer to his computer, only to discover it wasn't there. I found it on my computer, but---whoops, no network connection, so I can't get it to his computer to update it. Just one simple task, and it took half the afternoon just to figure out that I'm going to have to recreate the thing from scratch.

We haven't been able to finish shearing the last few sheep, because it's been raining. I have quite a few people who have specifically said they want to buy various sheep products (fleeces, skulls, horns), but even though the sales seemed definite, everyone seems to have vanished without actually taking the final step to send us money.

I'm so tired of worrying about money. My sister Donna is helping as much as she can, bless her! But her situation is as tough as ours, so I hate to put any strain on her.

We need to get rid of most of the horses. I've known that for months now, but with the market as it is, it's easier said than done. I think Donna may take a couple that I can't bear to sell to strangers, and she's going to try to help me place some of the others.

But if we don't make some progress in that direction soon, it's going to be a choice between paying the mortgage and buying hay. I don't want to have to make that choice.

I just want to put this whole horse fiasco behind us and concentrate on the farm as a whole again. I'm looking forward to our spring lambs. If we can manage it, in the spring, we want to get chickens. They wouldn't be to raise for a profit, just to provide eggs and meat for us.

I'm so tired of needing money to be the desperate, central focus of my thoughts every day and night. Money has never been my raison d'etre. I would rather do work I love for little pay than be rich at a job that doesn't capture my heart. But this farm means a lot to me, and I'll fight to keep it if I have to.

It just gets so discouraging when all the stupid little meaningless obstacles keep piling up on top of the large, genuine problems. It all gets to be too much sometimes. Hence my whiny posts to this blog!

Still... I try to think of at least one positive thing to talk about in each post. Today that is the fact that the sheep are mating. I think lambing time will be short this spring. For the longest time, none of my ewes were in heat, and now they're all coming into heat at once. Which means that the lambs will probably all start popping out at once in April. There's nothing better than waiting for lambs!