Old Dog and her New Trick

From Left Cathy Lafrenz, Deb Niemann and the Midlife Farmwife

One new trick...I can do. If I am given lots of time to practice. Two new tricks, I start to mumble in broken Gaelic and I put the milk in the pantry and the toilet bowl cleaner in the frig.

Blue cereal for breakfast? Never good. Especially for an organic farmer

The first new trick was learning Power Point for my presentation at Mid-America HomeSteading Conference in Joliet, Illinois this past Saturday. I was asked months ago to do two presentations; one on pastured beef and the other on pastured pork.

Public speaking is no problem. Sadly I was born with a microphone growing out of mouth that even after surgical removal continued to regrow. Finally my parents, tired of spending good cigarette money on my amplified mouth, called it quits and threw me to the wolves at age 16.

The wolves repeatedly threw me back, but THAT is another post all together.

So, the catch with the conference was this; the organizer of such, ( hard working, extremly well organized Deb Niemann of Antiquity Oaks)  suggested I use Power Point to give my presentations.

Now keep in mind, the 2 decades that I did LOTS of public speaking occurred in the dark ages. Literally. We used a thing called a slide projector and you put these small cardboard framed see-through pictures into it. You needed an entire cart on wheels to push your slide cartridges around and it was a well know fact...the more slides you owned, the more important your were.

I owned one set.

The room needed to be very dark back then, because the slides were notoriously poor having been developed from badly taken non-digital pictures.

But those days are past. No Boo no Hoo, slides were HEAVY!  And they would stick in the carosel. And the lightbulb in the slide projector never worked and you had to wiat 20 minutes for the AV geek to run home to get a replacement bulb. So using advanced tecnology for this conference did not bother me, but as is my norm,  I waited until the last minute to attack this Point of Power thing and then in a panic begged son number one to help me.  Which he did and soon I was dropping pics into imaginary frames likety split. Even more amazing I was able to save the whole deal on a pinkie drive?  finger drive ? Oh yeah, thumb...and I made it through my talks without too much trouble.

Conference wise, we expected 20 folks to show up, we hoped for 30 and we got over 50. It rained!  A perfect day to get off the farm and go sit in a mtg. I think friend Deb may have actually made enough to pay for the great lunch served. We met lots of new folks all wanting to learn much more about homesteading. Feeling their enthusiasm helped re-spark our own, a good thing after a very long, dry, hot and often discouraging summer.

As a speaker I was also able to attend some other sessions and in one, I learned how to make tinctures out of herbs. So funny. I've mixed alcohol and herbs together years ago but we never called it a "tincture"  Enough said.

I also sat in on Cathy Lafrenz's (http://misseffiesdiary.blogspot.com/) talk on starting the homestead business. Let me tell you this...she really is my most favorite Democrat in the world.! Vivaciously funny and work to the bones kind of gal, she motivates me every time I am with her.

I had a great day.