September 17th, 2011 by Dave Duffy
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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September 15th, 2011 by Dave Duffy
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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September 11th, 2011 by Dave Duffy
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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September 8th, 2011 by Dave Duffy
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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September 5th, 2011 by Dave Duffy
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September 2nd, 2011 by Dave Duffy
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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August 27th, 2011 by Dave Duffy
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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August 23rd, 2011 by Dave Duffy
You’ve probably already heard Washington D.C. had a 5.8 earthquake yesterday. Someone posted on Facebook: “Don’t worry, it wasn’t an earthquake. It was just our founding fathers rolling over in their graves.”
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August 21st, 2011 by Dave Duffy
My daughter and boys grew up swimming in places with names like Deep Creek and Secret Swimming Hole on Pistol River near our home in southern coastal Oregon. Today we went to Deep Creek, an isolated spot several miles up Pistol River. There were only two families there, one of which we knew and the other, with four small kids, we got to know. Deep Creek is a friendly place.
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July 18th, 2011 by Dave Duffy
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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