Bacon with Attitude and Famous Last Words
Sooo…about that website?
Heh.
Building (or rebuilding) a website is a lot like raising hogs, which I happen to know a bit about. We moved to our homestead in 2011. The idea that had caught our hearts was to build a farm retreat for military spouses to come and have their own R&R time. Being the wife of a retired soldier who had done (only) two tours in Iraq, I knew a bit about how punishing the optempo was for families of deployed soldiers, and we wanted to be able to create a place of rest for the invisible women back home who carried the weight of a war that was tearing countries and families apart.
There were two phases of this plan: the farm phase and the guest house phase; the million dollah question was, which phase first? We reasoned that building the farm first was the better move because there was a bigger learning curve and we didn’t want to be learning all about livestock while also learning about hosting guests; too many variables towards disaster. So farm it was.
Our journey to build our farm retreat included a breeding program of heritage hogs. The idea was that the sales from pork and breeding stock would fund the building of the guest house (yall in the back that have raised heritage hogs, quit laffin'). John grew up raising pigs, but it was a first for me. This town mouse was horrified at first, and then utterly charmed when the first piglets arrived. However, it wasn’t long before the charm wore off: pigs are an intense stock, y’all. Ohhhhh, how I wish we had discerned...
They get out of fences.
They scream like stark raving banshees at feeding time...
…even if you just fed them.
And you cannot make a pig do one single thing that the pig doesn’t want to do. The more you force him, the more you run yourself ragged tryna make him do what he refuses to do, and the longer you wait for him to do it while the pig laughs at you.
Harry Piggly circa 2013
I do not miss having pigs. 😆
And I don’t miss developing websites.
If I had a choice between building a website and a root canal, ok, OK—website—but other than that…
And it’s funny. I had a feeling as I was writing last week’s newsletter, proclaiming that the new site would be live by "Friyay", that I’d have to eat those famous last words, hoping that I could simply will it into reality with my buoyant positive attitude.
And so it has come to pass. Just as you can’t make a pig load up in a trailer, you can’t make a website be live and functioning by X date just because you spoke the words.
On a very positive note, the problems we’re solving now are good problems, and when we’ve got them sorted, you’ll find a beautiful, professional website that makes sense and is easy to use.
That said, if you have room in your prayers, I would sure love it if you could pray for this website project. I’m already weeks behind and getting antsy to be done.with.it, but like the pigs that used to run roughshod over us, you just can’t force it. It’s often a much better idea to stand back and let the pig sniff its way up the ramp to the bucket full of sweet, juicy grass. What that looks like for building a website, I have no idea, but man alive, I’d sure like to find out. 🤣