Stepping into the new year, if only on paper

My planner of choice

The beginning of a new year is exciting, especially on paper, that brand new desk planner/engagement calendar is opened and the crisp clean pages lay open before you waiting for all the exciting new things this year will bring.  In late December or early January I put my old planner - now stretched, dog-eared, filled with snippets of paper or articles I wanted to save, notes made on cocktail napkins, shreds of paper, business cards, etc - beside my new planner.  Carefully I move from month to month copying down important dates and reminders and collecting all of the saved information to re-review and decide whether that egg-plant recipe or that craft idea were really something I still want to hold on to.  Often it is a journey in what I did wrong, or Did I really invest all that time on that? But this year it has been pretty re-assuring even with everything that didn't go right in 2013. I found a scrap of paper with a carefully planned out financial inventory of the costs of raising a pig from piglet to slaughter using store bought feed. On the same scrap included the costs of raising broilers for the same time frame. Somewhere in the midst of the chaos I was thinking things through.
Beside both this year is my new monthly list of farm chores and my farm to-do list from 2012.  Breeding dates for does, incubator dates for pullets and sales dates for farm items or livestock that I noted last year are added to my list in the months they occurred last year.  I make note that the borrowed chicken plucker from last year will not be available to us this year - Make chicken plucker - when to schedule and collect materials - is added to the bottom of January.   This is a project I want to accomplish before I purchase my broilers this year, but don't have a month to put it in yet and have no idea what materials I have lying around or have to procure.  Apple trees were added to the January list to look into - am I going to try and rehab the old, existing orchard which is 20 years over grown and will be at least a three year project to reclaim but has some amazing heritage apples or would I be better off clearing out some of those trees and grafting the old trees to new root stock?  I can't make an educated decision on that project until I get out to the orchard and see what shape it is in.  I thought better and moved that decision to February hoping that weather permitting I will be able to get out there and have a better understanding of their condition.  Right now I am having trouble getting my vehicle out of my driveway with all the ice; walking out through the ice crusted landscape, albeit beautiful, might not be the smartest decision as far as my safety is concerned.

There remain several items and scraps of paper or URLs jotted down that I still want to look up and see why I thought they were important and items like the financial plan for raising a pig/broiler which I want to transfer to electronic format for ease of calculation.  Those and the big 2012 to-do-list are folded into this week in my planner.  After having gall bladder surgery last week I am limited on the amount of lifting and tugging I can do around the farm so I am relegating myself to administrative tasks such as these.

One of the most re-assuring things that has happened through this whole process is that even though I didn't even look at my big to-do list at all last year, we managed to get a few projects completed.  While I will always be adding to it, there is some reassurance in knowing that we are still moving forward.  I haven't decided which is more dangerous, risking injury to my body or planning big projects which will inevitably result in more injury to my body.