Ernie Hatmaker

 The last post, I let you in on some of the misguided goals I had previously shared on Youtube. The biggest one that pretty much had the axe in the heart was the quail.  Most people don't know (mainly because I never share that side of my life) that we have a family group of livestock...and some of our family members have quail and other animals separately from the main family group. Because we don't have the new house set up yet, we didn't want to do any livestock at the new place either. It just didn't make sense to have critters out there we couldn't protect, and we didn't want to add any more habitats for animals at the "old" homestead family compound. So the quail idea tanked... for 2020.   Even with everything pandemically going wrong with the world, I'm not giving up on living life. You have to keep pressing forward, right?  With that said, I will  share here (erniehatmaker.com) more of what's going on in our lives that I don't share

  So my homesteading goals for 2020 went the way of the Dodo. Like, literally DOA, disappeared without a trace, somebody ate the last one without realizing it-- extinct !  I laugh about it looking back and with all this mess in the world right now (talking pandemic, lumber and feed prices, everything ), I'm amazed I met any of my goals at all. Because I made the number one mistake when creating goals-- I told people about them. 😂 No. I made a concrete goal, a plan, and a deadline to do something that relied on forces outside my control  to complete.   First, the home site.  We already owned the property. All we needed was the soybeans harvested on the two acres we were going to use for Phase 1 -- I'm telling you, we have it all figured out-- and we were going to get concrete poured. The concrete was going to cost $5500 to pour for the depth of footings and the foundation pad. We had $5500.  That should be it, right?  Whim, bam, boom ! TAKE MY MONEY! It was kind of like one of