We’ll bring three young people to The Mother Earth News Fair in Puyallup, Washington, this weekend. They are Toby Stanley Jr, 20, who works at the magazine while going to college, John Werder, 19, who is getting ready to go off to college in September, and Sam Duffy, 17, the high school junior who is responsible for putting BHM onto the Kindle platform.
They helped me get ready for the trip, which begins tomorrow, by coming up to my house yesterday and mowing, weedwacking, and weeding. Good to see boys working hard, especially when it’s work I won’t have to do. John Silveira and I will need some strong backs to help set up the booth in Puyallup.
John Silveira, BHM’s senior editor since the beginning, will be at the Puyallup, Washington TMEN show. Puyallup is south of Seattle by about an hour. He joins me and Annie at the show. If you want the perfect inside view into what has driven Backwoods Home Magazine all these years. these are the three people to come visit with.
John very seldom does a show. It’ll be great for me and Annie because he’s so talkative we’ll be able to just sit back and let him greet everyone who comes up to the booth. Annie and I are relative recluses. Speaking of recluses, Claire Wolfe said she’ll visit the BHM booth and sit for a while. I’m looking forward to that as I met her for the first time last year and really enjoyed hanging out with her. I like hanging out with these “smarter than crap” writers I’ve recruited over the years.
These shows are probably more fun for us behind-the-scenes people than for readers. Many of us have never met each other, or we meet each other very seldom. We’ve all go our own power, as it were, and we’ve loosely joined hands to bring you BHM.
Silver is down to $28/ounce, which equals about $20/ounce for junk silver. BHM takes silver and allows $25/ounce. Great price for readers! I’m on Twitter too.
I’ve begun to tweet on Twitter and will probably do so on a more regular basis. Very interesting keeping to 140 characters. Every time you are forced to write into small segments it changes things. Rim editors (headline writers for newspapers) have to write very short and informative headlines, and good news journalists have to write concise and informative one-paragraph leads for stories. Tweeting seems to be somewhere in between. Tweeting might fit my style since I tend not to be long-winded. Short, explosive encounters is more my style.
Lenie Duffy, my wife and business manager for Backwoods Home Magazine, conducted her first concert of the Gold Beach High School band last night. She took over the band after the band director, Norm Rowe, an accomplished musician and member of the Curry-Del Norte Orchestra, died suddenly. Lenie has been the volunteer piano accompanist for the GBHS choir for several years, but this was a step into the unknown and she was very nervous.
The concert went off beautifully. The band played near flawlessly and everyone loved it.
Annie, Sammy, and I are on our way to the Self-Reliance Expo in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
We hope all our subscribers and other friends within driving distance will stop by and say, “Hi” tomorrow (Friday) from 10 am to 7 pm and Saturday, from 9 am to 7 pm.
