One recent morning, I caught bits and pieces of a segment on gratitude from the Today Show. I caught enough of it to make the snap decision to make “gratitude” my word of the year for 2019, but not enough to go back and find the segment online.

Over the holidays, a relative called and asked whether my sons and I could help him out. “Whatcha doing this weekend?” he asked over the phone.

Whoever the calendar guru was, I wish he would have made New Year’s in the bright morning of spring instead of the midnight of winter. It would have been so much easier to make resolutions and keep them. In spring, you have the birds chirping, new flowers leaping into blossoms and grass spreading velvet green carpet everywhere.

A new guilty pleasure of mine has been watching horror films. I used to scorn them for their predictability, cheap tricks and poor plot development. Now, I can’t get enough of them.

Happy New Year, everybody. It’s the first day of breaking all those resolutions. Don’t feel bad; 75 percent of people break their new resolutions within the first week, and the other 25 percent of people are the reason why.

In December 2018, I attended the DTN conference in Chicago. I had the opportunity to be part of a conversation regarding the future and how it affects agriculture in general and specifically dairy, as the group I was there with either have a dairy or provide feed to dairies. We had an interesting conversation regarding the byproducts we feed to our cows and what they may or may not be in five to 10 years.

We at Bremer Farms were bustling about as fast as Santa’s elves earlier this month. While the elves were building toys at the North Pole, we were creating a Christmas extravaganza on our dairy farm.

If you tuned into a news station or scrolled through social media over the past 12 months, odds are it didn’t brighten your day. Looking at the year in review, top headlines proclaimed political scandals, more mass shootings, horrific wildfires and just about anything to do with President Donald Trump.

Year after year, we listen to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and swoon with wonder at his understanding of the human condition. The three ghosts, Christmas Past, Christmas Present and Christmas Future, come to all of us in some form or another. In the autumn of my life, I am plagued with all three at one time.

As our industry’s main events – such as World Dairy Expo, NAILE, NDB/NMPF/UDIA joint annual meeting, the Dairy Girl Network Forward TogetHER and more fall conferences and events than I can type – come to a close, we gear up for year-end and the holiday season.