Handling life's curveballs

Without quitting in the process

Hello again my friend.

This time I want to tell you what’s going on.

It’s a good thing we’re still in “prepping month” because life just happened and I had to make some changes.

You ready?

Main quest 🛡

Instead of telling you a story with all the details, I’ll tell you what happened this week.

The son of a neighbor/friend of my father was helping us with the farm work during the past month. After all of the buzz from Christmas/New Year’s and other festivities ended, he said he was going to take a new job that came out for him.

My father phoned a guy who worked before for many years to come and start working from the 15th of January.

The guy arrived Wednesday but, lo and behold, he came limping and with a cane…

Turns out he did a wrong movement in his previous job and his back suffered for it (it was a herniated disc or something).

And as you can tell, he was completely unable to work as it was the original plan.

My father called a few people and asked for recommendations but after 2 days, there was no one who could do the replacement.

Before my father could have a mini heart attack, I told him that we would take charge of all the work for running the dairy cattle operation by ourselves.

He wasn’t quite optimistic about it because it’s much more work than we are used to and it needs to be get done, Every. Single. Day. But without no other option, he agreed

(I guess this is what Y Combinator folks call “founder mode”.)

So, effectively from tomorrow, January 20, I’m the main worker on the farm.

(If you had told me 2 years ago that I would go from being a full-time web engineer to a full-time dairy farmer… I would’ve called you insane and out of touch with reality.)

And since there’s only so much hours in the day (plus so much energy a person can have) I’ll have to put both the farm work and my online work in “maintenance mode” (at least for the time being).

Some people would say this is an unfortunate situation (my parents for instance). But I see it differently, this is a challenge and an opportunity to take charge with the skills I’ve developed over the past 6 months or so.

(Remember what I told you about the independence vs convenience tradeoff?)

I already started creating a daily routine with the help of Claude Sonnet to balance work and recovery. (The last thing I want to happen is to end in burnout.)

So it looks like I started the month with some plans and projects in mind but end it with a different path going forward.

For more specifics on how that will look like… take a look at the next section. 😉

Experiments 🧪

This time I started another longer running experiment.

City people like me have little to no clue about farm life and how to produce and prepare their own food (among other things)

And people from the countryside have little to no knowledge about technology like online platforms, courses, AI, and such.

But what if the two get mixed together? That is, ancient tradition and modern technology mixed together.

(I know that’s not pretty revolutionary and people have done that already.)

In my case it’s because I have no other options… I mean, by the traditional route it would take me years to learn the farming craft.

But now I don’t need to. Because I have a) my Supercharged Learning skills and b) knowledge and access to AI.

So… AI-enhanced farmer coming your way. 👨‍🌾

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Thanks for reading so far

I hope you enjoyed the read and know what’s happening from now on.

Take care and have a great start of the week!

Cheers,

Juan.