We drove through Montana’s wide open spaces all day, never quite making it to North Dakota but staying in the big city of Billings (120,000 population) instead. Lenie found a coupon at a rest stop that got us a big room on the 17th floor of the Crowne Plaza for $65. You can stay at some classy motels at affordable rates if you’ve got a smart wife.

Montana is absolutely beautiful. Lots of rolling hills and forests of all sorts. Not as lush as my Oregon coast but magnificent in a different sort of way. Most people from cities like New York and Los Angeles can’t even imagine these types of places. Then again, I suppose most people from Montana can’t imagine a place like New York City. Having lived many years in both the city (Boston) and the remote country (Oregon), I can attest to the vast superiority of the remote country.

Jackie Clay, BHM’s most popular writer, used to live in Montana but now lives north of Duluth, Minnesota. We’ll help her launch her own blog on the BHM website in coming days–perhaps as much as a week or two from now. My daughter, Annie, whose own blog is BrambleStitches, is our blog administrator and has to work out a few details. We’ll do away with Jackie’s online “Ask Jackie” column and replace it with a Jackie Clay blog.

Other blogs we’ll launch in the near future will be by John Silveira (politics, the state of freedom in America, etc.), Ilene Duffy (cooking and recipes), and building and energy blogs by people who have yet to be convinced to write them. The goal is to get a variety of useful self-reliant blogs collected in one convenient spot on the BHM website. It’s as exciting as heck to take BHM in this new direction of taking advantage of the available technology, almost as exciting as when I launched the first issue of BHM back in 1989.

1989 was much harder, though. I had to do everything myself until Lenie came along after the second issue. Now I have Lenie taking care of all business aspects of the magazine, while Annie (BHM’s blog administrator), Oliver Del Signore (BHM’s webmaster), and Joe and Tom McDonald (genius internet geeks from Vpop Technologies) help me with the internet stuff.

See you at the Energy Fair June 15-17.

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