I rarely, if ever, choose to use foul language on my website for three main reasons.

1. It’s not professional. It is not the image I want to portray, and it isn’t my style. There are some wildly successful bloggers who could put a crusty old rancher back on his heels with their language. I follow a few of them, and I respect that their style of writing is different than mine. But I still think it is unprofessional.
2. My mom reads my blog. She does some of the time, anyway, and she’s not a user of swear words. Out of respect for her and all my other readers who do get offended by swearing, I choose not to use it on my blog. Have you ever heard someone get offended by the absence of bad language?
3. The potential of future tiny humans. This is my biggest reason I choose not to swear on my blog. Should all the blades of grass on this planet shift to the right and I actually create my own tiny humans, I want this blog to be something they eventually turn to for history, for learning, for knowing their mum a little better than before. I don’t want my unborn tiny humans to read post after post filled with bad words they’ve been told not to say.

I’m not a perfect person. In the height of frustration, stress and anger, I can string together a bucket of curse words. My tongue sometimes gets the better of me, but in writing I have the opportunity to edit what I say before sharing it with the world.

I choose to edit any curse words, and that’s why I don’t swear on my blog. How about you? Curse or non?

{Image: GranniesKitchen}

The ducklings Flintstone-peddled to the switch grass for cover at their mama’s warning, and Mama Duck was a wild woman! She blew up a storm on the water to draw Doc’s attention away from her children (which completely worked, thankfully), lost him upstream and silently double-backed to where she’d told her children to hide.

It was so amazing to see – and understand – duck language. Animals talk. Sometimes we just aren’t listening.

Is it weird that my mind immediately jumped to my tomato seedlings? It’s weird, I think. I’d just set them out to soak up some sun and warm temperatures, and that clatter-bang-boom…

I shot up from my chair, slamming the coffee cup on the table, and raced for the door.

Carnage. Dead bodies everywhere. Limp remains scattered down the stairs to the driveway. My border collie had just massacred my tomato seedlings.

I yelled! I lectured! I raged!

And then I buried the bodies of my little tomato troopers. I don’t hold great hopes of survival, but I tried transplanting them anyway. As valiantly brave as they have been, a border collie mauling is a war-ending battle.

The tomato attack wasn’t really about the tomatoes. Doc hasn’t – to my knowledge – been harboring any deep-seated rage towards tomato plants. He generally chooses to pick on things his own size anyway. However he DOES like to chew on plastic things, and my tomato babies were living on a plastic tray.

I may have slightly over-reacted at the demise of my tomato seedlings. I can get more plants. And unless I have miracle powers of transplanting that I don’t know about, then I will get more tomato plants when my seedlings die. But I won’t be able to start them from seed as the growing season is too short here, and – darn it – for a person who struggles to keep green things alive, it was a huge accomplishment to have those little buggers still with me.

It’s natural I have the drive to be self-employed. It’s how I was raised after all. Ranchers are the ultimate entrepreneur, I think. Volatile markets, weather, disease – all of which a person
can’t control – and trying to make a living at raising cattle is just about as risky as it gets.

And yet here I stand, bucked off the first time I saddled up my entrepreneurial horse. I made some serious mistakes in my inaugural attempt at owning a start-up business. I’m not proud of it, and I’d really rather not talk about it. Who wants to do a public postmortem on their failures? I’d much rather just shove them under a wagon and pretend like no one walking past can see them.

I’d certainly like to do that with my failed start-up business, but I know there are a lot of folks just like me who have awful big entrepreneurial dreams. While I didn’t make all the mistakes below, I made enough of them to learn the rest of them.

Learn from my mistakes, okay? Don’t go making these on your own time when they’ve already been spent on my dime.

11 Lessons from a Failed Entrepreneur

(in no particular order)

• Know your business. Total “duh” note, right? Except that when you go into business with other people, division of duties happens pretty quickly. This is good, but you still need to be solid on all the areas outside of your expertise. If something happens to your business partners, you need to know how to run things.
• Be passionate about it. Starting a business is incredibly time-consuming. It makes it easier to spend all your spare time working if you love what you’re doing. I liked my business. I believed in it. I didn’t love it, and I wasn’t passionate about it.
• Know when to say no. Expanding too early. Purchasing things that aren’t essential. Get a backbone and say no if it isn’t a good financial business decision. Or an ethical business decision. Definitely say no then.
• Decide how much money to put into it. Try to put a cap on how much money you are willing to invest in the business before you’re in the middle of it. This is an investment. One that you’re hoping to get a return on, and you need to treat it like one. There’s no sense in tossing money at a rank bronc who can’t be ridden.
• Know when to let it go. That rank bronc? Sometimes you have to admit you’re not the one to ride it. There comes a point where more money, more time, more dedication, more input just isn’t going to turn a failing business around. There’s a fine line between keeping a business floating and being pulled underwater with it.
• Write a business plan. How are you going to get where you’re going if you don’t have a trail? Sometimes it’s okay to strike off cross-country with a vague idea of where you’ll end up. In a start-up business, that’s not okay.
• Pencil. Pencil. Pencil. Push that pencil. Estimate your input costs and what you hope to make. Be aggressive on the input costs and conservative on the profits. Don’t forget things like insurance, advertising, registering costs and regulation requirements. Pencil it all out and then pencil it again. Recalculate, re-add, reassure that you’ve got something that has potential to work. It costs nothing to pencil. It can cost everything to assume you’ve got an idea that will carry you to the barn.
• Schedule business meetings. This one isn’t too popular as meetings seem like a waste of time. They can be, but an even bigger waste is when business partners aren’t communicating. And by waste, I mean detrimental to the business. Until you’ve been “married” to your business partner for awhile and the business is pulling a profit, business meetings are essential for everyone to continue saddling the same horse and riding in the same direction.
• Don’t bend the rules in the first year. If you wrote a business plan, stick to it. It’s tempting to make exceptions for friends or special cases. Don’t do it. This is a business. Treat it like one. You won’t be able to help out anybody if your business doesn’t exist. After the first year, you’ll have a better idea of where you can afford to do pro bono work. Go for it then if you’re moved to do so.
• Evaluate your business partner choices with your head, not your heart. Be brutally honest with this decision. Brutally. Honest. Friends don’t necessarily make good business partners. Spouses don’t either. Can they be? Yes. By default? No.
• Show up. Starting a business takes commitment. A lot of time. Money. Sacrifices. There were a lot of times I really wanted to be out riding, mowing my yard or sleeping instead of showing up at my business. Due to a combination of several of the above mistakes, I stopped showing up as often. I don’t think the business would still be going if I had lived there five nights a week, but it surely didn’t help that I detached myself.

Maybe you’ve read through this list now, and you’re thinking Well, gee. There’s nothing earth-shattering here. This is common sense stuff, stuff you read on a whole lot of entrepreneur blogs and websites.

You’re right. But I read those blogs and websites too. And I’m chock full of common sense, even two-thirds full on a bad day. You think your start-up business will be different. That it will survive any miscalculations, poor decisions and slow money flow. Maybe it will.

And maybe it won’t.

This time next year when my youngest sister graduates high school, my mom will have spent 35 years of her life raising kids. 35 years of never-ending laundry, big gardens, cooking, baking, sewing, yard work and ranch work. 35 years of weathering the mini-crises that come with have six kids who turn into six teenagers.

Now that most of her kids have launched their own adult lives – consequently reducing the number of ranch hands – she’s filled the gaps where we used to stand. She sorts calves, moves pairs and fixes fence.

In a way, I admire her more for working on the ranch simply because it’s not natural for her. Raising kids was something my mom was naturally good at and enjoyed (I think?). Handling livestock is not something she enjoys or even particularly likes, but she has done it because it needed done.

The way people tackle things they don’t like says more about them than any words could. My mom is one who doesn’t need a lot of words, because her actions stand up all on their own.

She is a superstar. Not in a way most people are going to notice. No capes or magic wands or fancy cars. Just in a real quiet, back-of-the-scenes type of way. That’s the mark of something special, I think. When the absence of what a person is doing would make a real impact that you’d notice right away instead of the occasional over-the-top awesome incident. And even though I’ve heard reports of store-bought cookies being served for dessert in the last few years (!!!), my mom is still doing all the cooking, cleaning and laundry in addition to bossing cows.

Superstar. That’s her.

I just can’t cut the team anymore than I have so you get all these pictures today.

Snake River canyon pastures

Gus

Ladies in waiting.

Peggy or Polly - I can't ever remember who is who.

Snake River

Turk

My tomato babies are not ready to be released into the harsh mountain wilderness yet. There was a hard frost clinging to the north Idaho pastures surrounding my house this morning. I refuse to let all these mornings of remembering to water my egg carton and placing it in the living room window’s sun die at 32 degrees.

I’ve never started tomato plants in an egg carton before, so I’m anxious to see how they weather the transplant process when temperatures allow it. I’m hoping they thrive, but I’ll be happy as a June bug in May if they simply survive.

You see, I’m a notorious plant killer. The past five years anyway. I grew up in Iowa where God took care of all the watering. Out here? God expects me to do my own watering, and I’ve been known to forget on occasion. Unfortunately for the plants, those occasions often come one right after the other.

I’m hoping this year is different for my dozen tomato babies. They’ve already survived the dog stepping on them when I set them out for a little afternoon sunbathing session. They’ve survived the one or three times I missed showering them with love and H2O.

They can survive, I’m sure of it. These 12 little guys are troopers. Tomato troopers. And if one dies, I’m really hoping the rest will pick up his sword and carry on with the battle instead of diving in after him until no man is left alive.

Just mix all these ingredients together. Preferably in a pretty red bowl.

Ingredients
1 1/4 cup flour
1 egg
1 cup milk*
3 teaspoons baking powder
1 tablespoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup blackberries
*I used about 1/3 cup of juice and 2/3 cup of milk

Butter a skillet, and drop the blackberry pancake batter in. Bigger is better! Small pancakes aren’t allowed in my house.

Plate the pancake, and ignore the purple-ish/blue hint from the blackberries. Give it a hefty dose of syrup. Sit down and devour your plate-sized blackberry pancake!

My counter attack is a crack of Indiana Jones’ whip and a concentrated effort on thankfulness.

Things to be thankful for:

• Coffee, and more coffee.
• Josh Abbott Band, Chris LeDoux, Bleu Edmondson.
• A forecast filled with 60s and sunshine.
• Supportive people.
• New ideas, fresh dreams.
• That dirt-digging, cow-chasing, furry friend of mine.
• Conversations. The funny ones. The hard ones. The real ones.
• Dirt (mud?) roads.
• The bigger picture.
• The process of letting go.
• Cheese! It’s a food group.
• Where I live.
• Time in the saddle.
• Capturing moments like this. –}
• Publication design. Web design. Graphic design.
• Cowboy boots.
• Manual transmissions, pickup trucks and four-wheel drive.
• Bonfires and backroads.
• Rural life. Great neighbors.
• Laughter and living.

What are you thankful for?