I LOVED the video!
In spite of being filmed for a movie, many political comments to state and federal officials on both local food and energy policy and doing farm tours for approximately 200 people a year including radical animal rights people trying to injure me or my animals every year I am very camera shy.
I’m mumble years old, retired from full time work about 20 years ago. Now I only work a farmers day, half time, 12 hours a day. I have spent my entire life working with genetics and breeding animals even when I was a systems engineer and in high tech. I’ve bred fancy guppies, cichlids, various species of lizards, Corriedale sheep, milk and Angora goats, lab strains of mice, fancy rats, some snakes, meat rabbits, meat guinea pigs, show chickens, meat chickens, laying chickens, meat and egg laying ducks, geese, CMK Arabian horses, half Arabian mules, Shetland sheep, and finally my current (last 21 years) Black Welsh Mountain sheep.
I’m looking at the problem of aging out of active farming due to physical issues yet I am having a really hard time figuring who I am if I’m not actively planning for breeding some sort of animal species. I can kill plants by looking at them so plant breeding is not an option.
My husband and I have no human children and spent our working careers working for government contractors on various projects. He’s an electrical engineer and hardware designer and I’m the general purpose software programmer and scenario writer.
I am trying to move my love of genetics and the intricacies of programming into making LambTracker a full featured, well supported open source project that outlasts me. I want it to handle genetic calculations, genomics data, EBVs and bloodline groups as well as day to day flock management issues. I also need to support rare breed conservation and provide tools for fast disease tracking to prevent excessive loss of life like happened in the F&M outbreak in the UK. I am also trying to make a difference in my community fighting inappropriate fracking and documenting our historical society collections using my computer skills to make archive quality digitizations of important photographic and visual collections.
I’ve been a Sci Fi fan for as long as I can remember. I learned to read on a combination of Dickens and Astounding and Amazing and the classic Sci Fi from the 20s, 30s and 40s. My grandfather taught me cryptography by sending me letters in codes and ciphers from as soon as I learned to read that I had to decrypt before I could read them. He was a cryptographer in WW II. I love both old and new Sci Fi, from Firefly to Heinlein and everything in between.
I need to find people who will guide me in finding my new place in the universe while not losing my zest for life.
I can probably provide very odd and unusual bits of trivia that might spark a totally different way of looking at a problem. I am unfortunately acerbic and not good and moderating my opinions. If you ask for an opinion you will get one. Filtering can hard for me.
I can also offer some grounding in reality, because sheep happens.
I would prefer an asynchronous text or forum based interaction with a mastermind group because my ability to make set meetings is iffy most of the year.
