WR # 2 Finished Yesterday.
After spending most of the last review fleshing out the projects that a bunch of my "last action to finish" items really were, this review was spent mostly deciding that a whole bunch of these new projects are too big to get done in the next 2 months!
I'm in the throes of trying to write and practice my speach for the Livestock Conservancy Annual meeting. I'll be going down to Austin, TX and will be talking about records for rare breeds and my LambTracker program. This will be biggest public event I've ever spoken at! So I'm reviewing all my notes on making good presentations, trying to plan it all out and looking for appropriate pictures to illustrate the issues I want to bring up. I have toprovide my handouts and presentation to the organizers by the end of this month.
The other big set of stuff is that our weather is changing fast, we've had frosts already and everyone expects an early and hard winter. So we're scrambling to do the fall "get the farm ready for winter" projects done. A lot of them have been delayed due to the rainy summer we had, things like cleaning out the sheep corrals that are normally done by the end of August haven't even really gotten started because it's so wet. My husband had to build a new attachment for the tractor that can handle picking up the heavy wet manure pack first before he could even start on the cleaning and that's taken a while. Then the first one broke while he was cleaning the first corral so he had to rebuild it stronger. Now we have sheep in those corrals in quarantine so they can't be cleaned.
My set of get the farm ready for winter tasks include pulling down and repairing all the electric nets we use to separate pastures and I can't do that work in the rain so I've been on hold as well. Now that it's sunny we have to catch up on the sheep evaluations that are normally done in early September and get all the blood samples drawn. You can't take blood from a wet sheep and it's a 3-4 person task so I have to schedule extra help and hope the weather cooperates. So far it's been hit or miss, mostly miss. Add to that programming the LambTracker enhancements I need to capture the evaluation data and produce the required reports and it's been very busy. We've got slots for 30 more sheep to send to slaughter but I am not sure who I need to send until I get the evaluations done! Next slaughter date is next Thursday so I really need to get it all working by then and the sheep evaluated.
One thing Omnifocus does not handle well are these sorts of contingent projects. I don't want to put them all as subprojects within one big massive one because then I get overwhelmed when I see the same project on the list with tasks for months on end. Yet while in many cases many of the actions can be done in parallel now we are getting to a time when at least some actions are dependent on some other project being finished first.
For example, I need to move the newly arrived rams into pastures with our ram lambs so we can clean the quarantine pens. But I can't add them to our sheep until they pass their blood work. I can't draw blood until I have dry sheep early in the week so I can ship it to the lab via fedex and have it arrive in time to run the test that week. So for weeks now the projects get delayed!
No real solution, it's all dependent on weather at this point.
Ah well, it's clear and sunny this am and has finally warmed up enough for me to be able to go measure ram scrotal circumference (my hands freeze doing it when it's too cold out, uncomfortable for me and the rams involved) so I guess I need to finish posting and get out and get ram evaluations done.
