Got home at 4 am this morning, after arriving at Portland airport and spending the day helping Jake and Robby move into their dorm rooms. Jake’s got the better room, a private room on the 10^th floor of a Portland State University dorm overlooking Portland. Robby’s room in Corvallis at Oregon State University is much smaller with no view and he’s sharing it with another student.

Kind of weird with only Sammy at home now. He rose on time for school this morning, even though he nabbed only four hours sleep. That was the deal: He can do these Expos and miss a day or so at school, but he’s got to be able to get up and go to school when we get back. Otherwise, no more shows. He liked the show a lot so made sure he got up.

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Lots of sirens in Denver tonight. The sounds echo through the hallways among these big buildings like coyote calls echo through a high desert landscape. Just a few make a big racket.

The Self Reliance Expo was a success, sort of. We had a net loss of $2300. It could have been much worse, as these shows are expensive to do, mainly due to air fare and hotel expenses. The anthologies that never got here turned out to be very important in the final tally. Sales of anthologies typically pay for our expenses and make the shows profitable. We’ll have to rethink how we do these long-distance shows.

But I made important contacts. Can’t put photos of the good people I hung out with in the blog tonight because the hotel computer won’t accept the SD card from my camera, plus it’s late and I’m tired. It was sure fun hanging out with Don Childers and his wife, Nancy. Don turned 81 this month and has painted the covers of BHM since Issue No. 1. I introduced him to every subscriber who visited the booth.

Toby and Sammy got a good lesson in how to adjust to a curve ball when you’re expecting a fast ball. They’ll be able to handle future shows by themselves just fine. Plus they traded subscriptions and a small ad for some T-shirt and knives. Toby won a drawing for a three-months supply of freeze-dried food.

I mainly do these shows to meet readers, and I met a lot of them the last two days. It rechargers my batteries when I see first-hand how people value the magazine and how much it’s changed their lives. I’m looking forward to doing this same show in Sandy, Utah Oct 7-8. John Silveira and I will drive to it so there’ll be no problems with shipping product.

Sam and Toby are out walking the city tonight, while I’m having a glass of wine at the hotel. Just got a text from Sam that they are going to see the movie, Contagion. They should read my essay of a few years back from my “Stupid People” book of how disease could cause a big problem for America some day. That’s real stuff, not a movie.

Lenie told me earlier this evening that she hit an elk last night with her Acura. She’s fine and the Acura has only a little damage. She hit the tail-end of a bull on Highway 101 just 12 miles north of Gold Beach. Slowed down suddenly from 55 mph. Very lucky! Those tall-legged animals sometimes go through the windshield and kill the driver. Life’s full of near misses.

We fly back to Portland, Oregon tomorow morning and we’ll meet Lenie and help Jake and Robby move into their dorms  in Portland and Corvallis. It’s a busy weekend.

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Plan B

The Denver Self Reliance Expo is tomorrow and Saturday but we have nothing to sell. In fact, we don’t even have a magazine to show customers. Someone at the National Western Complex, where the Expo is taking place, refused our shipment of 17 boxes of magazines and anthologies when they arrived Sept 12 because they mistakenly thought the boxes were for an Expo that had already taken place. First time that’s happened in 23 years. The boxes are now back in Oregon somewhere.

So Sam, Toby, and I have switched to Plan B. That includes Don Childers driving up tomorrow morning from Fort Collins and bringing his back issues and anthologies so we can at least display something. Annie sent a pdf file of the order form to a Denver copy center and I had a bunch of them printed up tonight.

Such is life, I guess. Good planning can go awry due to an occasional fluke. We’ll just wing it with Plan B. Maybe we’ll discover something useful for the future.

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The current issue of the magazine says that BHM will have a booth at the National Heirloom Exposition in Santa Rosa, California, this Tuesday through Thursday, Sept. 13 through 15. We’ve had to cancel our appearance there. The timing just didn’t work for us so we made the decision to cancel out. We should have never committed to the show or announced it in the magazine, as it conflicts with our deadline here for our next issue. We are still on that deadline now. It’s too bad we’re going to miss it; it should be a very interesting show.

We’ll definitely be at the other three shows we’ve announced in the issue, namely, the Self Reliance Expo September 16-17 in Denver (the dates are a bit off in the print issue), The Mother Earth News Fair Sept. 24-25 in Seven Springs, Pennsylvania, and the Self Reliance Expo Oct. 7-8 in Sandy, Utah.

I personally had planned to attend only the Utah show in October, but will now attend both the Utah show and the Denver show this coming week.

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Today is BHM cover artist Don Childer’s 81st birthday. Happy Birthday Don!

Don lives in Colorado now but still paints our covers. I asked him this morning to send me a current photo of himself and he sent me the one above, which is two years old.

I’ll see him next week at the Self Reliance Expo in Denver. This is a show I was not scheduled to attend, so don’t believe your current magazine issue, which has me not attending. I just decided at the last minute that my son, Sam, 16, and office worker, Toby Stanley, 20, needed my help at this “really big” show so made the dreaded plane reservation to fly on out there. Don lives an hour and a half south of Denver so will drive up Saturday.

So if you want to see what the old codger “really” looks like, come on up to the Denver show and say hello. He says he feels terrific.

Meanwhile we are finishing up another deadline at the office.

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Are we headed for a double-dip recession like the headlines today are suggesting? I think so! In fact, I don’t think we ever came out of the initial recession and are simply heading deeper into the swamp.

Annie and I have been working for several weeks on not just the upcoming November/December 2011 issue of Backwoods Home Magazine, but a special Jan/Feb 2012 economics-based issue with the theme of showing readers “how to walk a safe path through the deepening recession.” Don Childers has already painted the perfect cover for the issue, and Annie has assigned a series of articles to various writers with good ideas. I’m even doing a special article in addition to my editorial for the issue. The issue will be 16 pages longer than our usual 100 pages.

America’s economy is really a mess, as are the economies of most countries in the West. It’s not one politician’s fault or Congress’ fault. Part of it is a global shift of economic power from the West to the East due to the East adopting free market economic principles. We wanted all those countries to be free, and here’s what we’re getting – competition. China’s success is due primarily to its increasing use of Capitalist economic ideas. America is going the other way; we’re regulating ourselves to death.

The internet is playing a big role too. Companies are no longer just American, but international. They’ll go where labor is competent but more affordable. That often means China and India and other places in the East. A lot of people like to criticize corporations for “sending American jobs overseas.” It’s just businesses acting freely and accessing labor markets that allow them to compete better. No politician can make a law against that that is in anybody’s best interest.

Bad times are getting worse and we’re simply going to have to navigate through them until America rights itself. Our Jan/Feb 2012 issue will help. We’re putting a lot of energy into it.

I’m not just playing golf, you know.

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We’re gearing up to launch a Kindle version of the magazine. The first one will probably be the Jan/Feb 2012 issue. I think this, as well as a Nook version and ipad’s eBooks, is the future. We monkeyed around with a digital magazine launch a year or so ago but after six months of work we realized that our current website was far better than any digital version. But Kindle makes a lot of sense. It’s easy for the reader to use, easy for BHM to format for, and it has both protection from pirates and a reasonable profit margin. It will open up the entire English-speaking world to BHM. With our superior content, we’ll do well with very little financial risk.

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Deadline hasn’t changed much in the last 23 years, except Annie has taken over the bulk of the work. But I still write the editorial and help select articles. I often work with my newest assistant, Clara, in my lap. We’re a day away from completing deadline for Issue No. 131.

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Lenie and our son, Sam, will be hosting a Backwoods Home Magazine booth at the Oregon Green Expo at the Jackson County Fairgrounds in Medford, Oregon, this weekend. If you’re in the area, stop by and say hi. Expo hours are Saturday 10 to 5 and Sunday 10 to 4. This is a pretty small show, but we thought we’d do it since it’s only a 3-hour drive from home.

The show has booths operated by companies who offer a product, service or resource that saves energy or creates healthier and more self-reliant homes.

This is our first time doing this show. Sometimes these small shows are surprisingly fun.

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The energy fair in Custer, Wisconsin is this weekend. Jackie Clay and Will will be in the Backwoods Home Magazine booth. If you can, drop by and congratulate them on their wedding, which just took place.

Lenie and I will not be there, but the Tee-shirt offer of the last few years will be in effect, namely, wear a BHM Tee-shirt to the fair and Jackie will give you a free anthology. If you don’t have a BHM Tee-shirt, you can buy one from Jackie at the fair (but she’ll only have a half dozen or so) or make your own, as several people have done in previous fairs. At the recent Mother Earth News fair in Puyallup, Wash., Nina Hooper of Seattle came up to the BHM booth sporting a home-made BHM purse. That’s close enough to a Tee-shirt so she qualified.

Also, if you have a copy of our Issue No. 1, you can trade it in at the MREA Fair for $50 worth of merchandise, based on retail value. At the TMEN Puyallup Fair, Larry Wilson of Marysville, Wash., brought his Issue No. 1 to the fair, but wouldn’t part with it.

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