When life throws a curveball, or two or three…

Life definitely threw me a few curveballs this past week. It all started out Saturday. I was helping Shannon move some giant belt thingies that we used in place of landscape fabric (always trying to be frugal) so that we could move our pigs to till up the area for our garden. Welllllll, I didn’t realize the surface of these things could be so slick and with just one step, my right foot flew forward and upward so fast that my back was on the ground and then BAM! The back of my head hit the rock hard, iron ore claylike substance most places refer to as the ground. If you’ve ever been to northwest Louisiana when it’s not raining, you know that the ground is like concrete. It’s HARD. There is no softness to it. I have never in my life hit my head so hard. I don’t know how I didn’t lose consciousness, but I didn’t. I did see stars though. Lots of brain fog ensued from that moment forward. Back in the summer of 2020 we had our first experience with Covid and with Covid we had brain fog. It was the worst; think Mommy Brain 10.0. The horrible brain fog was back, and brought with it the worst headaches I had ever had, and then my energy was GONE. Like it just disappeared with my brain. Long story short, two doctors later, I had a concussion. My first and hopefully only concussion. Everything in life had to take a backseat, such as this website I have been working on for over a month now. Life doesn’t just stop for us in these moments though, so I kept pushing on and helping Shannon around the farm as much as I could, and then…..

BAM! Another curveball! I woke up Tuesday morning, all groggy from brain fog and pain meds, to a text asking “did you delete your FB?” Ummmmm, No!!!! What the heck happened?!?

For somewhere around fifteen years now I have kept up with friends and family from all walks of life via Facebook. My whole life was on my Facebook. Facebook came into existence in my life around my freshman or sophomore year of college (Geaux LA Tech Bullldogs!) and I have used it as my main source of communication all this time. It was a HUGE reference point. I could find anything on there. Any group to learn more of literally anything. My most recent favorites were the Goat Emergency groups because we are preparing for our first kidding season. Why would I DELETE my Facebook???? Then the screenshots and texts messages started rolling in…. my account had been hacked…. apparently this Lily Collins had taken over tons of peoples fb pages. She took mine over and did who knows what and fb decided it was “against their community standards” so without any hesitation or question they DISABLED my fb before I had a chance to do anything. Remember, I have a concussion, so trying to figure all this out and find out how to get back into my account was just making my headaches so much worse. I finally threw in the towel. I created a second account, praying it was just temporary, and found a few email addresses for facebook support, and started sending emails. I’m still waiting on that response…..

So that evening (still Tuesday) we came home and I planned to help Shannon feed, work on homework with Sammy, then go to bed early to rest my brain. NOPE! Another freaking curveball! We always feed our two calves first, but when we went out to the pasture, they didn’t greet us at the fence like they always do. Shannon searched that section of pasture and they were gone. Somehow they had pushed open the back gate and escaped. Thankfully, our two billy goats, Billy & Teddy, and Landry hadn’t escaped with them. I attempted to close the front gate in a hurry to go get my truck keys, then proceeded to drive all over our twenty-five acres looking for David and Daisy. I drive back around to the front of the house and see Landry. In my rush, I didn’t latch the gate and now she had pushed it open and her and Gracie were in the yard. Sammy and I run back to close the gate before the goats can get out. Gracie followed, but Landry decided last minute that she didn’t want to be put up and decided to take off down the road. Shaun came to my rescue and chased her down through our neighbors’ backyards, finally catching her. I drove down and we loaded her up in the truck and took her back home. By this time Shannon had found the calves. They were playing in the mud down the dirt road next to our property and he was trying to get them back in the gate. After about an hour of this circus, we finally had everyone back in their pastures. When I finally got to sit down again, I received a fb message from earlier in the day: “Hey, this is your neighbor. I just saw your cows walking down the road.” Those two had been out all day roaming around getting in to who knows what.

During all of the chaos that entailed this week, our second order of meat chicken chicks came in (one hundred and two day old chicks), we hatched out seven Barred Rock chicks, five barnyard mix chicks, and two turkeys, then picked up our first three Cream Legbar pullets and two Dutch pullets. We have near one hundred and twenty feathered critters in our den right now! Hopefully all goes well this weekend and we are able to get some moved to our brooder room in the barn; crossing my fingers and saying my prayers!