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Hit 500 whole pigs butchered this week without counting until now
Was cleaning my books and found my old tally sheet from when I started apprenticing in Austin back in 2016. Never thought I'd hit that number in a lifetime, let alone before turning 35. Anyone else keep a running count of something weird like that?
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nancyjones1mo agoMost Upvoted
Hit 500 whole pigs butchered this week" - man, that's a hell of a milestone. I learned the hard way that keeping a physical tally sheet beats guessing, because your memory plays tricks on you after the first hundred or so. If you're tracking something like that, write down the date and location of each one, not just a number. It comes in handy later when you're trying to figure out which spot gave you the best yield or worst hangup. Also, don't let anyone borrow your tally book, because I lost a whole year's count that way and had to start over (still salty about it).
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jakeb811mo ago
Ha, bet that tally book is still haunting your dreams like a ghost pig.
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drew_hart41mo agoTop Commenter
jakeb81 said "bet that tally book is still haunting your dreams like a ghost pig" and yeah, you're not wrong. I still get twitchy when I see someone reach for a notebook on my bench, like I'm gonna lose another year of data. The thing people don't get is it's not just the count that hurts to lose, it's all the little notes you scribble in the margins about weather conditions or how the pigs were acting that day. That stuff is gold for figuring out patterns later, like why a certain spot always handles poorly on humid mornings. I still keep a separate backup now, just a photocopy in a ziploc bag in my toolbox, because once bitten and all that. But honestly, losing that book taught me more about my own process than any clean record ever did.
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