How We Got Here, June 2013

So, there are folks who don't know me at all, or very little, who have been passed the link to my blog.  I felt it prudent to tell the greater audience a little about myself and how I ended up on the farm.  Here goes.

I grew up here in Montana on the family farm.  I worked on the farm every summer since I was 7 or 8 years old.  I started out pulling weeds in the peppermint fields and moving "hand" irrigation pipes (aka. the ones that sit on the ground and latch together).  I also drove tractor for my larger siblings and father to pick up and lay out handlines.  I remember it being a struggle to reach the clutch on our two-cylinder "Popper Johnny" John Deere tractor.  We called it that because every so often it would backfire a little bit.  Not exactly a smooth runner, but it was probably already 20 years old already when I was born.  It still runs, by the way.

I worked on the farm every summer, often 7 days a week if we were running irrigation.  We had to keep the pumps running to 1) keep stuff from blowing out and 2) filling mainline (the large diameter pipes that run underground to each of the "risers" that we hook up the irrigation lines to) took forever and it was a waste of money to keep filling / draining them.  Both items are related; often, when starting up a pump, we would forget to turn enough lines on, or just turn one on and not get to another line fast enough.  The pump, back then, didn't adjust for pressure (it just ran 100% flow all the time) so it would just increase pressure until something burst and we'd have to find the geyser on the irrigation system to repair after we shut down the system.  This "blowout" usually happened once or twice a summer so it wasn't that big of a deal, but it was a lot of work and lost time to repair the breaks.   

When I got older, I started operating the larger machinery; the balers, loader-tractors, etc.  I eventually started repairing all these things, provided the repairs didn't require a lot of muscle (I was, and still am, "somewhat wiry" rather than bulky like many farmers) or welding.  I started college at 18, took my first semester at a local community college, then went off to engineering school.  Every summer I had internships that took me out of state so I didn't work on the farm at all except if I landed at home between semesters or internships when something was going on.  I, however, made it home for harvest time late August before school started up.  Often times, we were all sleep deprived and simply plodding on just trying to get the work done during harvest.  Which made for a ripe environment for embarrassing photos.  

Anyways.  I finished my undergrad degree in Dec 2004, then went back to an extended internship in Idaho before heading off to Ohio that July for a short internship.  I started my masters at Virginia Tech in September 2005.  There, I worked on my masters degree in Mechanical Engineering until 2007.  

I finished my coursework in the spring of 2007, but I was still working on my masters thesis.  I went to Ohio for another internship where I continued work on my thesis.  I accepted my first engineering job in Maryland while I was still interning in Ohio during the summer of 2007.  I was supposed to finish my thesis before I started working in MD, so I went home to Montana after that last internship to concentrate on my thesis.  I worked on it 7 days a week, anywhere from 8-12 hours a day for several months.  After three delayed start dates and a whole bunch of disappointments with the thesis (it was programming, basically, and the reasons it didn't go well are an entirely different story), I decided to start working in February 2008 despite not having my thesis completed.  I did eventually complete it in January 2009, and my advisory team more or less said "sorry" for how much work I did with little results to show for it.

Up to that point in my life, there had been many instances where God brought me through tough situations and I ended up being in a position of undeserved blessing.  Looking back, this has been a theme in my life.  I'll talk more about that in another blog.

My first job was a desk job, doing engineering work.  You might say that it wasn't your "concrete" engineering job in that a lot of the things I was working on weren't really in existence yet.  I enjoyed the work, but I more enjoyed the people I worked with and the relationships I established there.  Additionally, I found a church in MD was pretty much amazing: they had modern worship, they moved in the gifts of the Spirit, they weren't a "pat you on the butt and send you home" kind of church, and I developed many, many close relationships at the church.

Things were going well, I even started looking for a house in earnest to avoid paying rent.  I looked at many, many houses, but none of them "felt right".  To my realtor (and friend) who walked through all this with me, I am very sorry I never bought a house, by the way.  But I do thank you for being so understanding and accommodating throughout that part of my journey!

I continued working and started getting more involved in the community: first with a young adults bible study which I ended up co-leading with two amazing young women, and second with a community development program that taught job skills to a number of parents from a local elementary school.  I found that I really enjoyed coming alongside people and facilitating them maturing / learning things to bring them to a new level in life.  I'm not sure that I was good at it, but it brought a lot of "life" to me, if that makes sense.

I started craving the outdoors, as during the winters I would often not see the sun.  I took up fishing on a much bigger level than I'd ever done in Montana (huge mistake not taking advantage of the fishing in Montana when I was younger, by the way).  I didn't care about catching fish (thankfully so, because I didn't catch many), but I simply enjoyed getting out in God's creation, getting some sun, and casting out in the water.  

Work was going well, but I started getting projects piled onto me and the "non concrete" part of the work started bothering me because I was juggling so many projects and had to "good enough" many of them rather than coming to a concrete solution.  I like knowing that I'm right about something, and not knowing that I was right was starting to get to me, I believe.  I still loved the people I worked with, but I started getting stretched a bit too thin.

I took my first vacation overseas in the Spring of 2012.  All my previous vacations had been spent visiting my family back in Montana.  When I got back from Germany, I went to Ohio the following weekend for a friend's wedding.  Had a great time there (I made many good friends in Ohio when I was an intern there).  Sometime between that trip to Germany, the wedding in Ohio, and getting back to MD, I decided I was going to go home to the farm to help my father.  Indefinitely.

I realized I was working for a paycheck that I didn't necessarily need (I was out of debt, had saved up quite a bit, and had no family / girlfriend keeping me in MD), and I was starting to feel like my grace for being in Maryland had been lifting for quite some time.  My nieces and nephews were growing up without me, my parents weren't getting any younger and were still quite spry for their age, and... well, I felt like God was telling me that it was time to move home.

I made the decision approximately May of 2012.  I didn't tell anybody outside my family until December, and I didn't actually leave my job until May of 2013.  People asked me why I waited so long, but the main reason was that I had several projects that I wanted to wrap up as best I could and not leave my coworkers in the lurch to try to get up to speed.  I was fortunate enough to see many of them about a year after I left and they are all doing well.  If I left them in a bad position on any of the projects, they didn't say anything about it.  Haha!

So, I packed up all my junk in a 6x12 Uhaul, hooked it up to my well-aged GMC 1/2 ton truck (thank you to my pilot friend who helped me with all those repairs we did before I hit the road!), and drove home early June 2013.  The hardest part about leaving Maryland was saying goodbye to so many good friends there.  On the drive back, I visited friends in VA (Leesburg and Blacksburg), Ohio (Columbus and Dayton), and took a leisurely 10 days to drive a little over 2600 miles.  I showed up at home on June 16th, Father's Day (poetic, no?).  We unloaded my trailer and dropped it off in town that night.  I moved back into my old room in my parents' basement.

Before I left Maryland, my father and I had discussed how it would be good for me to ease into things and start slow since I'd had a desk job for 12 years and my physical body definitely would need to get used to having a labor-intense job again.  But I digress.

I got home on June 16th.  On June 17th, at 7am, we poured 38 yards of concrete and I got severe tennis elbow in both arms that same day.  I spent the next six months trying to get the work accomplished and not overdose on Advil to curb the extreme pain I was in.  So much for the easing into things.

And, thus, starts the story of how I pressed "reset" on my life.