March was definitely unmitigated madness around here, and I don't even follow basketball. Don't really have time, although I suppose I could make it. I just prefer participatory things, and since I was too short, and didn't hit my athletic stride until I was about out of high school (and then it was on skis)... I go antler hunting instead. And, did make it out a couple of times, but that comes way later.

Shed antler hunting tends to be way more work than "work", but it was work where pandemonium prevailed in March. Not that I expect it to let up...

Our oilseed ventures turned bizarre more than once, occasionally multiple times in the same day!

Various labeling issues had been in the works for months. Thirteen months, in fact! And now the pressure was on, as our artist was going in for heart surgery, which Thank God he came through OK.

I forget how many incarnations our label had been through. We'd been through the alphabet well into the second time through, and then got hung up temporarily on size issues, among others. But most fortunately, things fell together, as they often do.

Getting to that point can make your head spin, though. I've joked that it should be "reality" TV, although one of my New Year's Resolutions was to keep real life vastly more interesting, so here's parts of "a day in the life".

We're going to be buying some camelina from other farmers, and one significant (and in my opinion somewhat underpublicized) issue is that the oil content can vary widely, it seems. But hey, it shouldn't be that hard to run a test...

And we did have substantial oil testing done on a few samples, for which we're grateful. Except it didn't have this fundamental total oil content item. Which we're told was difficult/impossible to come by. Hmmm...?

And then were referred to a likely distribution prospect, which (at least so far) turned into a dead end. Strangely so, and I was beginning to wonder if I was a source of amusement or something. The "small world" effect was in full force, and everyone we're dealing with are connected in some way or another, we're talking not even hardly one degree of separation in these cases.

OK, but we're not even through the morning yet. Had a meeting scheduled for that afternoon, with a fairly high-octane "international marketing consultant" we met at the prior Farmer's Market. She of course hates our existing label, and instantly the "less than one degree of separation" thing re-asserts itself. That, and there's no way we'll be able to trademark our existing logo and the whole business name needs to be scrapped and start over!! With pros doing it this time.

I'm sure there was another thing or two cropped up that day, but those few items were enough...

But there's still way more!

Most of those issues sorted out, in fairly decent order. The trademark things... thank God Al Gore invented the internet!! Makes researching these sorts of things incalculably easier, although it still takes some doing and I can see why there's lawyers that specialize in it, although not much around here. Except for one, who also falls into the one-degree criteria. Plus our artist came through, but that's later.

These small-world things are just uncanny, I tell ya... A few days later another fortuitous contact (on multiple levels, this is beginning to resemble a web!) referred me to a another professor at MSU, who can do the oil content tests no problemo. And, the same day talked with a farmer in the north country, who we were referred to by Farmer's Market contacts. He'd just gotten his oil content tests back from the State Grain Lab that day.

So this is not much of an issue after all! Still a head-scratcher, though...

And then, our label... the artist, Murphy, was scheduled for open-heart surgery last Thursday, and heading over to Billings on Wednesday. So bedtime Tuesday was the deadline, although I really don't like using that word in this context (and now we're past such concerns!). The concensus on the re-done logo was that it "kicks ass!!", but it was getting late on Tuesday evening, past bedtimes, and we'd most fortunately just corrected a last-second math error, and were hung up on a new phrase "grown and bottled on our farm in Montana". Except it's not all grown here! But apparently wineries normally evade this issue by saying "produced" instead of grown. Boy, that's a grey area, though, and maybe that's how wineries do it, but I dunno...

So we slept on it, and at the very last second, Wednesday morning removed that phrase, and called it good. We all laughed in relief, although humor is a totally inadequate word for that emotion.

And then... actually it was the prior Friday. Right in the midst of the normal pandemonium, got a call informing us that the cow and yearling bison harvests are like... history. For now, anyway.

This is due to them placing survivors of the Yellowstone bison quarantine fiasco on the Flying D. Of course, the fact a very successful bison harvest operation, with hundreds of multi-time repeat clients was being ran in adjacent pastures immediately came under criticism, and it was speculated that's where some of the quarantine survivors would wind up. Of course, that wouldn't happen, but no matter...

So, that blows! In fact (and this is relatively "normal"), this morning I've already had numerous calls, including three individuals wanting to book a buffalo, and two others wanting three apiece. And we have to tell them "NO"?

Gads... that's an extremely poor business model.

So we'll see. I'm not sure anyone gets used to this March Madness thing, but at least we've learned to roll with it. You gotta...