I was out doing chores on my farm yesterday morning and ran across something surprising (to me, at least). By the pig pen, we have an electric fence charger and it is covered by buckets. For some reason I don’t understand (my wife did it), there are two buckets – one nested inside the other. Yesterday, I removed the top bucket and inside it, I f...
We have two Great Pyrenees dogs (a male and a female) who guard our goats and keep the coyotes away. When we got them, we decided that we would breed them (they are not related) at least once. Almost 3 weeks ago, Artemis’s litter of puppies was born. It’s been fun to watch. My wife (the vet in the family) happened to walk in just as Artemis was...
And an embarrassing moment. I’ve gotten some teasing about wearing a tie at the French Visual Studio 2013 launch event in Paris this week. There are some pictures of me floating around online. It’s certainly a rare occurrence. I don’t wear a tie more than a couple of times a year. I brought it on this trip ...
We are gradually working our way into goats. Last year we bought a dairy goat and she had 2 kids. This year we bought 2 meat goats (Kiko breed) and one of them, “Pretty Girl” just had 3 kids. I thought I’d share some pictures. They are very cute. Here’s a picture from soon after they were born. And here’s a picture of my daughter and ...
I try to share some of the funnier and stranger stories from my life. Unfortunately, I don’t always remember to share them. I’m working from home today because I’ve got an all day phone call with people in Redmond. As I was sitting and waiting for my meeting to start this morning, the phone rang. It was the camp adjacent to our farm. The voi...
Saturday night I was at my son’s lacrosse game with the family. My wife got a phone call. It was a fellow farmer and neighbor, Noah (about 2 miles south of us). His question was “Are you missing a cow?” The answer, of course, was we didn’t know. Even if we had been home, counting ~100 cows turns out to be a lot harder than you’d think – the da...
OK, I made up the numbers. I debated what to call this post. Adventures with a horse? Water: a famer’s nemesis? It’s been a fun couple of days. Sunday night the whole family was out doing chores and my wife and kids were exercising the horses. I finished up the chores and left them to wrap up with the horses – feed them, clean up etc. Ye...
I try not to use my blog for too many personal things but I couldn't resist. A good friend of mine, who also happens to be one of our Visual Studio ALM MVPs, sent me an email. He told me about a project his daughter has undertaken to have the world commemorate the life and work of David Warren - the inventor of the flight data recorder,...
It’s been a long time since my last farm post. As I’m just wrapping up a major project, I figure now is a good time to provide an update. When we first bought the farm, we thought our primary activity was going to be goats. After doing some research on difficulty of raising goats, market for goats, etc we decided to go with cattle – they are WAY...
I saw on Twitter some people expressing their disappointment at my wearing formal clothes for the launch keynote. I feel it necessary to defend myself Ok, not really, but there’s a funny story here. I was packing to come to Seattle last week and it occurred to me that no one had said anything about dress code. So, being me, I thought, hey, i...
