We’re at the 29 Palms Inn (historically called the Oasis of Mara) in a hundred something degree weather. Luckily our first couple of days here were overcast so it was only in the 90s. Still too hot for someone used to the 60s and 70s. The swamp cooler in our fairly primitive cabin works fine, but we have to battle a few flies and ticks. This is one of our favorite motels. It’s primitive by design. We even have to go outside to use an attached bathroom. It has regular plumbing but no swamp cooler, so it’s like being in a sauna. But we love the place. Sam and Rob sleep in the loft, Jake on a couch, and Lenie and I have a real bed.

The Inn is an oasis in the Mojave Desert. Very old with about a dozen little cabins scattered around it. It has a natural little pond with lots of palm trees, a huge garden that supplies its excellent restaurant, and a pool off the restaurant. We especially like to swim at night as we listen to a musician perform. (I mentioned the trumpeter Bill Church and keyboardist Beverly Derby in a previous blog.) You also often get serenaded at night by a pack of coyotes. We saw a big coyote earlier today–as big as our black lab–just behind our cabin. I’d hate to be stranded in the desert and be surrounded by animals that size.

We got here by traveling Interstate 5 though several hundred miles of California’s San Joaquin (pronounced SAN-WAH-KEEN) Valley, which is always a thrill for me. It is one of the great bread baskets of the world, producing vegetables, fruits, and even beef for most of its length. It is primarily food grown for human consumption, as opposed to the hundreds of miles of Midwest corn we drove through a few weeks ago which is grown mainly for animal consumption.

We left Interstate 5 near Bakersfield, passed through the extraordinary wind farms of the Tehachapi Pass, then began a temperature climb of 20 degrees as we headed towards the Mojave Desert, a hot, unforgiving wasteland that contains Twentynine Palms and other hapless towns. This motel oasis is one of the few livable spots around here as far as I can see, even though there are several nearby cities–Joshua Tree, Yucca Valley, etc.–with tens of thousands of people. Those residents probably came here for the jobs provided by the Marine Corps Base, which most acreage of any base in the country.

This may be our last trip to this part of the world, unless Erik reenlists again and gets stationed back here in the future. I’m looking forward to visiting Annie and Erik at their new home among the relatively lush landscapes of North Carolina near Camp Lejeune. Unfortunately, we’ll probably be seeing less of the grandkids, Olga and Gavin, due to the longer distance involved.

Lenie had to to race in her car for five miles to catch the FedEx truck, but today we made the noon deadline for the September/October issue. Had we missed it, we could have missed the newsstand by a week, which could cost us money. It has to do with making trucking deadlines in the distribution chain. But we are not nearly as dependent on distribution on the newsstands as we were years ago. That’s because I took steps to wean us from that dependency by cutting back our newsstand presence. Sometimes readers who like to buy us from the newsstand complain that BHM issues are difficult to locate, but it’s for the best. The newsstand is a losing proposition for most small publishers; the middleman, namely the distributor, makes the money. I’m satisfied with the 12,000 or so issues we put in the larger bookstores, such as B. Dalton, Waldenbooks, Crowne, etc. through Ingram Distributors.

I have horror stories about large distributors and the amount of money they’ve screwed small publishers out of (including BHM) with their various bankruptcies and changes of ownership. Distributors battle amongst themselves for primacy in the newsstands; it’s always the small publisher who ends up taking any losses. Even now, with the small numbers we have on the newsstand, there is another shakeup in that industry that I am keeping my eye on, hoping we are not going to get hammered again.

Lenie, Annie, Rhoda, Lorraine, and Ramona have done the work these last two days. I just had to write my columns and give a little direction to some of the pages. Lenie worked at the office until near midnight both nights. She used to do all-nighters, but we both agreed that’s just not healthy.

Tomorrow morning we begin the thousand mile drive to Annie and Erik’s house in the Mojave Desert. They are preparing to move the first week of August from the 29 Palms Marine Corps Base to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, so we’ll help them clean up their rental. We had planned on this visit long before Erik got his orders for Camp Lejeune, and we’ll stay at the 29 Palms Inn, one of the most pleasant motels in the entire Mojave Desert. They offer fairly primitive cabins with swamp coolers. No telephone, TV, or Internet. It’s meant as a getaway for people who work too much. We qualify.

At this late stage during deadline, it’s always the same problem: What the hell should I write about in my columns? The “Note from the Publisher” is easy; I just talk about what’s going on in the magazine, sort of like these blog posts. The “My View” column is harder; it’s got to be more substantive. Like most people, I take the easy way out and write the “Note” first. Some of the topics will be the energy show just completed in Wisconsin, the protective plastic wrappers in which the print issue is now mailed to subscribers, the new blogs on the website, some letters I got between issues, and the upcoming issue’s rather unique cover.

I’ve been thinking about the “My View” column for weeks, and I have a fair idea of what the kernel of the commentary will be, but it’s not well formed in my head. This column is always hard to do, even though I’ve been writing it for nearly 18 years. I’m not an off-the-top-of-my-head writer, speaker, or thinker when it comes to more “weighty” topics. I need time to sit back and think. Like most Libertarians, I tend to consider both sides of a political issue but almost always favor the side that supports more individual freedom. But this issue I have a nonpolitical topic in mind. We’ll see.

The wind has begun to blow so my opportunity to fish the ocean before I have to leave town again (this Friday, the day after deadline) may have been missed. Isn’t that a shame?

My golf game is improving thanks to deadline. I work on articles at the kitchen table, then go out and hit golf balls at selected targets. I work some more, then hit more balls. I’ve got four targets: a water spigot 35 yards away on the other side of our small pond, a tree 50 yards up the hill, a white pole I put in the ground on a flat spot 65 yards up the hill, and a small cedar tree 80 yards down the hill on the other side of the yard. I’m getting good at all of them. My goal is to play bogey golf.

Molly rolled in something dead so the boys had to shampoo her and hose her off. At the same time, we’ve got a feral cat, a skunk, and a raccoon all sneaking in the barn and eating the cat food, then trying their best to get at our chickens. We also suspect a rat is stealing chicken eggs. Our chicken enclosure is like a high security prison, but other defensive measures we’re taking include putting the cat food container into the garage so the raccoon can’t unscrew its top with his prehensile hands, then feeding the cats twice a day with only what they can eat. We’re also gathering the chicken eggs several times a day, plus setting a trap for the rat inside the chicken house. With luck the rat will be caught, and the coon, feral cat, and skunk will leave when they can’t get any free food for a couple of days. If the skunk goes under the house to have a litter, I’ll throw in a few moth balls to drive her away.

If that doesn’t work, it’s war!

Deadline is going fairly well. Lenie’s computer crashed yesterday, but we worked around it as most of the files for this issue are on what we call the “deadline machine.” Lorraine, Lenie, and I selected placement for all ads, have page numbers for all the articles, and are dealing with Don for a few more pieces of art. Things go together rapidly these last few days because so much preparation work has been done, principally by Lisa, during the previous two months. It’s like a big puzzle now, with me primarily responsible for fitting the pieces together. I like this part a lot.

It will be Lenie’s, Lisa’s, and Rhoda’s jobs now to finish up the details as I write my Note from the Publisher and My View columns. Lenie will handle the technical jobs: flowing ads and articles, tweaking headline fonts, creating filler ads to sell BHM books, laying out the cover with bullets (BIG IMPORTANT TASK), and making sure the pages look attractive and clean. The real burden at this point falls on Lenie because she has the computer skills and artistic vision to make things look right. (Funny, she never touched a computer before I met her; now she knows more than me.)

Rhoda will finish up proofing articles for Lenie. She’s turning into an excellent proofer with good wordsmithing skills, and I plan on expanding her responsibilities. This is a critical area. Too many word snafus and the magazine appears amateurish. Lisa will take care of everything else, including typing up a “pagelist” of instruction for how the printer should handle the several hundred files we will FedEx him Thursday. She has her eye on the future and will be examining what articles I pulled and what ones will fit into next issue, or a future issue.

The issue is superb, and that’s what counts. It will keep us in business.