Two weekends ago, Stephanie and I drove up to visit Terrie who’s living in a yurt at the Bodega Goat Ranch.

A few words about me and Terrie. We first met in San Diego in 2005 at ETech. My friend Patrick saw a job posting about something to do with Blogging and RSS and thought of me. It turns out Terrie was looking for a new web producer at O’Reilly. I had a brief interview with her there, and then flew up to San Francisco to interview with the rest of the team. Not only did Terrie take me on a tour of Sebastopol, Petaluma, and Santa Rosa, but she also let me crash at her place. O’Reilly offered me the job, I moved to California, and the course of my life was forever altered.

A year later I left O’Reilly for Federated Media, and the story should have ended there. But for some reason it didn’t. Terrie started doing these interesting things. She got chickens. She left O’Reilly, but not for another job. She moved into a yurt. On a goat farm. Where they make cheese. So even though our professional paths diverged, our non-work interests only seemed to converge.

Which goes part of the way towards explaining how, two Sundays ago, we found ourselves visiting Terrie and holding baby goats.