Day 23 -- I am (I am?) married to my boss.

I have spent a good part of today making sure that if people want to see videos of EVERY heifer we have on our sale, that they can do it.  (see https://www.facebook.com/theresaboian for a video of every heifer we don't have on our website yet).

One day, Holly Spangler (see her 30 days blog) posted about how her father advised her to look not only at love when choosing your mate but whether or not you could work together.  He advised this the first time she brought her now husband John home to meet her parents.

Wow -- what insight! Especially as I reflect on the workload on our farm right before our sale.  Working together on a farm is definitely not an easy task, especially when you're married to the person you're working with.

I've been reading book reports from my students yesterday and today.  I ask the students in my U of I class to read a book during the semester -- something that I hope they would be able to talk about in a job interview.  As ag economics students, naturally many of them read a book on things like leadership in the workplace, communication and organizational strategies in a corporation, how to deal with high conflict people (I may pick that one up tonight on amazon).

These books are full of tidbits of advice when you are in a workplace setting, an office.  Strategies like "over communicate", or "provide clarity again and again", or "lead with the lid on" are great when you have a setting that can provide structure around these strategies.

A farm is not one of those places.  Neither is a household, a bedroom, a breakfast table, the shower.

It's communication that will allow us to save our marriage during these high conflict times, it's clarity that will help us to know who is managing which piece when there are 50 of them flying around and needing to be done, and it's leadership that will help me to understand where I can best help in this stressful time.

My workplace here at home is full of other needs that aren't going away -- and I'm not sure I'm doing a good job of separating the household/family from the business right now.  But in this place, I'm not sure how I can.

Today a family from Alabama picked up a heifer they purchased from us -- they were intrigued by our snow flurries on the farm and VERY cold -- so cold that most stayed in the house while Alan showed heifers to them.  And I don't think it's that cold yet.