Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Venturing Out

We enjoyed today what one sleep-deprived meteorologist called an "ice sandwich." A layer of snow covered in ice and then coated with another four inches of the white stuff.

I ventured to the end of the lane to get the mail and newspaper. I guess all that rain, sleet, snow, dark of night stuff is for real--both were delivered on time.

What do tough country kids do when it snows? They put on their Carhartt jackets and head out.

I may have spawned a fair weather farmer after my own heart.

We live on a busy county road, with cars usually whizzing by at 55+ mph. Today, there was little evidence we even had a road at the end of our lane.

Here's the view facing west. I only include this to impress my husband who often laughs at my inability to know which direction I am facing. The little blacktop showing is courtesy of my brother-in-law who scraped the lane and then kept going.

THIS is snow removal country style. Oh, yeah. Of course, Husband spent all day shoveling out the pigs, so my car and little cement pad behind the house remain covered in ice sandwich.
You know you're married to a farmer when ensuring that every animal has a place to poop takes precedent over de-icing the minivan.

Sunday, January 25, 2009

An Open Letter to the FedEx Letter Writer

If you don't know about the Twitter debacle with Ketchum and FedEx, then visit this site. But please come back.

UPDATE: I'm not the only one wondering about the letter writer Fusion PR Forum: Who Wrote the Infamous Ketchum/FedEx Email?


Dear FedEx letter writer,

Wow. On behalf of all the corporate communications professionals who ever sat by and watched our bosses spend millions on a "big-time" agency, congratulations. You have done what many of us dreamed of. These agency vice presidents (they are ALL vice presidents) swoop in from the big city and assume that the in-house PR people are simpletons who have no clue how the world of communications works. How many times have we all dreamed of throwing their know-it-all arrogance right back in their faces.

But we keep quiet because our bosses and their bosses are completely in the tank for these big-time agency people.

But you, oh, you took advantage of the reach and range of Peter Shankman (a mutually beneficial arrangement, I must note) to make sure your observation of the big-time agency guy's disdain for your HQ town didn't just get buried in the inboxes of management. You were not to be ignored.

And what a firestorm you started. The agency guy you outed got all the press. You remained anonymous.

AdvertisingAge called you a tattletale and a punk but that's little comfort to the big-time agency since they did write about the whole "tempest in a Tweetpot" anyway. Your company was nicer, at least externally, when they said in a statement to PRWeek, The reaction by our employees proves once again that FedEx takes great pride in our hometown of Memphis.

From the minute I heard about your note, I have wondered about you and whether there have been repercussions for airing this dirty laundry in such a public way. I hope the culture of FedEx is different but my experience has been that embarrassing the boss and second-guessing their choice of big-time agency have both been career limiting moves. I'm sure the media relations team would also like to wring your neck--if nothing else, for exponentially increasing their workload.

FedEx letter writer, we live vicariously through you, wishing we had the guts to say to the world about our boss's choice of meeting speaker: I don’t see much relevance between your presentation this morning and the work we do...

Best of luck to you. And if you ever need to visit a town with even greater self-worth issues, we'll call your Elvis and raise you two Wright Brothers.

Holly

Monday, January 19, 2009

A Rare Breed

[NOTE: If you are interested in purchasing Herefords from us, please visit http://www.bonavistafarm.com/.]

I've always known that we had something unique going on. I mean, how many 30-something non-Amish full-time farmers are there anymore?

But recently we've learned that not only is our life on the farm rare, but we are raising endangered species! According to the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy (ALBC), we are raising two breeds on their conservation priority list.


Decades ago Husband's grandfather decided to raise Ayrshire dairy cattle, probably for their hardiness, their rich milk, and their overall appealing look. Over the years while other farmers either left dairying altogether or switched to higher-producing Holsteins, our farm stayed with Ayrshires. According to the ALBC, there are fewer than 2,500 Ayrshires registered annually in the United States and the estimated global population is less than 10,000, putting the breed on their Watch list.

While the decline of the Ayrshire breed happened slowly around us, the rarity (or plain old unpopularity) of Herefords was well known to us when we started raising them. When Husband and I were engaged, we saw a special exhibit at the Ohio State Fair of this old-time breed that was making a comeback, Herefords. A year or so later Husband returned from a pig show and told me to come outside and see the pig he bought me.

Our first Hereford gilt raised State Fair champions the very next summer and soon, as State Fairs started offering Hereford shows, our pigs were in demand. We have been producing State Fair champions ever since (see champ from the 2008 Indiana State Fair pictured above) and doing a steady business in s&men sales too.

Even for all our efforts to grow and improve the Hereford breed, they are, according to ALBC, on the Threatened list, with fewer than 1,000 annual registrations in the United States and estimated global population less than 5,000.

So here we are: living a rare life on a family farm with a rare full-time farmer under 40, who raises rare species. For some reason, things are rarely normal around here.

Saturday, January 17, 2009

Just an Ordinary Day

Today was an average Saturday. We got up a little later and headed out to do errands, including haircuts for the boys and stops at the dry cleaner and grocery.

Just an ordinary day in small town America, right. Then we took time as a family to look at pig s&men in the laundry room. [I don't want to be flagged as one of those sites, so excuse my intentional typo.]


Husband had just collected this s&men from the boar and allowed us to take a peek at the little swimmers with our newly fixed microscope, which has been out of commission for years, for lack, we just learned, of a $7 light bulb.

Anyway, the little swimmers were really doing their thing on the slide.


This is not the moon. It is my very low-tech way of trying to show you what we saw through the microscope. The individual swimmers looked like tiny, tiny sticks flipping up and down. The darker areas on the slide were where they were clumped together, not moving as much.

I don't know if Justin could see anything but he said he did. And he didn't ask too many questions about what we were looking at. S&men is not an unfamiliar word at our house. I actually mentioned this to Ryan's teacher at conferences--in case it came up and she thought we had big problems at home.

Our lesson on little swimmers concluded with me telling Ryan about eggs inside the sow. And Husband taking a bottle of the little guys outside to do their job.

Another normal Saturday.

Friday, January 16, 2009

Movin' on up

Got the great news today that this little blog has been included in the "online magazine rack," Alltop.

Alltop, all the cool kids (and me)


I'm in the "rural" page,because they didn't have a category called "corporate farm-wife mommy PR blogger."

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Delivering Financial Advice for the Family Assets

Whenever we meet with our financial advisor, I feel like I've just taken a crash course in Econ 201 again.

Ok, this is the point where I feel like I have to apologize for having a financial advisor. No, I don't have millions, only a desire to stop working before I'm 70. Of course, husband fully intends to croak in the show ring at the Ohio State Fair some day.

Back to economics...

So our financial advisor is explaining to us the benefit of our new strategy, called active management where we have our small investments managed like a big fund, with experts moving our money around from stocks to gold, to under his mattress, to back into small cap stocks, to Bernie Madoff (luckily we didn't get to that step).

We are having this in-depth financial discussion at our dining room table, which is very convenient except for the fact that our small children also have access to the dining room.

Our three-year-old daughter races in and skids to a stop. She is wearing a marker-stained OSU cheerleader outfit. She stares at the financial advisor, a very nice man who wears a tie, and finally says are you the pizza man?

We shoo her out and proceed to discuss the status of my 401K rollover, and how many millions of today's dollars we'll need to save just to keep ourselves affording Depends, Pepsi two-liters and State Fair passes.

Our four-year-old son marches in and stage whispers to my husband Ryan says that's the pizza man. Disbelieving his father, he says loudly to me, Is that the pizza man?

By now our financial advisor is ready to have us sign some forms and discuss our contribution to Roth IRAs (or something), when our son returns. Naked from the waist down.

He streaks through the dining room, forgets his pants and then streaks back through to get them.

After we had given our financial advisor a detailed peek at the family assets and accused him of working in food service, we sent him on his way.

A few years ago we would have been mortified by this whole experience. But as veteran parents, we simply tossed our son a pair of undies and finished our pizza.

Thursday, January 8, 2009

100th Post

Whew! This is the 100th post to this blog. How did that happen?

There's no use repeating my year in review post, so I'll just share a few scenarios that illustrate the double life I lead.

Once, I freaked out my east-coast-transplant Vice President, because I told him to hold on for a second (we were both in our cars on the phone) while I navigated around a cow in the road. He didn't even think to ask the first question everyone around here would have: whose cow was it?

I took my husband to a casual corporate event to which spouses were invited. Later, I was told by several people in the most complimentary way, he doesn't LOOK like a farmer.

Last summer, I did a job interview (by phone) from the swine barn at the Iowa State Fairgrounds.

Two summers ago I cashed in my frequent flyer miles, earned by going to meetings in NYC and conferences in Chicago, for a round trip ticket to Des Moines (A tip: not too many blackout dates for DAY to DSM).

I held a contest among my communications co-workers to name our new boar. The winning entry - Magnum PIg

This year for Christmas I bought my husband something useful for his career. A Blackberry? Oh, no, a microscope for checking the viability of pig s&men. He will do this on our washer.

So stick around for the next 100 posts. You never know what's going to happen next around here.

P.S. If you know ANYONE with at least one clicking finger who lives in Wyoming, Vermont or Rhode Island, please have them stop by. I must feed my addiction to Google Analytics.

Saturday, January 3, 2009

PR Idea of the Week

I was traveling northbound on Gettysburg Ave. (before the intersection of James H. McGee) in an economically depressed part of Dayton this week when I saw a billboard. Could it be? The Dayton Patented campaign? I paused in the turn lane to snap a few photos


The story about Devon Berry is a good one. Local guy sees the world but decides Dayton is where he wants to raise his family. That's all well and good.

But it seems like this would be phase two of the campaign. What about a campaign just to socialize the rubber stamp logo? They are really trying to do a lot with the four seconds they get until you speed past this billboard.

This is really the first I've seen or heard from the campaign since there was an article in the Dayton Daily News and some blog chatter back in August. Maybe, since I'm already committed to living and working in greater Dayton, I'm not seeing the campaign because I'm not the target.

Everyone's a critic when it comes to branding, so I'm trying to be supportive. I will say that the City of Dayton is missing a few opportunities on this one. First, they could be using people like me and other local bloggers to spread the word. We would do it for free! A cool badge for my blog would be nice, noting that I'm also a Dayton Original.

And how about that t-shirt order page? You have to GO to the public affairs office (between the hours of 8:01 and 4:59, I bet) to buy one? Are you kidding me? I'll buy one online, especially if you throw in two more for me to give away on my site.

Dink-dink, dink-dink (that's the sound of me tapping on the monitor). Are you there Dayton public affairs office? It's us, the people of Dayton. We are originals. We want the city and therefore the region to be cool. Let us help you.

Thursday, January 1, 2009

Thanks for Reading in 2008

Happy New Year! Thanks for reading this blog.

Thanks to those of you who openly read the blog and bring it up in conversation with my husband who then says I didn't know that. And thanks to those who are closet readers and try to pretend they don't even know I have this blog--I know who you are (can you say Google Analytics) and I am very tempted to out you by posting embarrassing photos of your spouse [just kidding, I think].

And a special thanks to my friend M who started last year at this time urging me to start a blog, so she alone didn't have to hear about how I thought my son felt like an octopus when he was being born.

What a year it has been. We had a a presidential election, a hurricane, an earthquake, and a blizzard and this blog was there to cover it all.

I tried to offer content you couldn't get on other blogs, so I enrolled all of you in remedial agricultural education, including pigs 101 and field trips to the World Pork Expo and the county fair. In covering agriculture I tried to give you special access to exclusive information like the secret code of pig farmers. I worked to broaden your horizons and teach important terminology. I toggled between grossing you out and sharing cute photos of pigs.

I put a lot of myself out there for you, including sharing my compassionate side and my best motherhood wisdom in addition to my thoughts on married life. And sometimes I very gently joked about my husband. Like the time he fought crime.

Oh, and just to keep this blog really from finding a niche, I made "interesting commentary" on PR and marketing issues.

The best compliment I ever had on the blog was from my friend MP who said after reading on her lunch hour I almost shot Diet Coke out my nose. Here's to more ruined nasal passages in 2009!

Appointment Pooping

  NOTE: If you do not want to read about my healthy bowel movement, well too late you just did. I recently became you-better-get-a-colonosco...