Chickens are kind of dumb. If they weren’t protected by humans through domestication, I think they might become extinct in a few years. But I really like them, and not just because our chickens have given us a steady supply of healthy eggs for years. Chickens are just fun. They are not only friendly and like to follow you around, but they do all sorts of weird things just like other pets do.

This time of year our chickens free-range, but they are so used to interacting with my family, dog, and cats that they poke their noses into everything, including our house. A few days ago I chased a Barred Rock out of our kitchen after I caught it eating a plate of leftovers it had knocked off a countertop. This afternoon I found one nesting in a box of screws in the garage. I had opened the garage door in the morning because the temperature had climbed to 60 degrees.

Unfortunately, while I went to fetch my son, Jake, to show him where this dumb chicken was nesting, he had jumped out of the box of screws and broken both eggs. Maybe I was dumb! I should have grabbed the eggs first.

We have a lot of big trees in my area of Oregon. My three sons play in them often, sometimes alarming Mom with how high up they can climb. I wandered the woods with my youngest son, Sam, for a couple of hours yesterday and got a lesson in the various names they have given different parts of the forest, mostly names borrowed from the movie, Lord of the Rings. The backwoods is really a wonderful place for kids.

 Work continues on the May/June 2008 (No. 111) issue. As much as I try to maintain a calm demeanor as I engineer it, my enthusiasm is being transmitted to the writers and editors. There is something special in the wind. They know it and I know it. The mix of articles is about right. The theme, which will remain secret, is perfect. This is going to be a great issue. I predict it will sell out immediately on the newsstands, and our subscribers will buy up the extra 10,000 or so copies we’ll print as gifts for friends and relatives. This is when it’s a lot of fun to be running BHM. You can transform great ideas into nuts and bolts.

We’ve sponsored two subscription contests recently on internet forums.

 In the most recent, on the Alaska Cabins and Remote Living thread of the Alaska Outdoors Forums, we gave away six one-year subscriptions to the magazine.

Recently we sponsored a similar contest on the Homesteading Today Forum, on their thread, Homesteading Questions.

Sponsoring these forum threads and holding the contests have been great opportunities for BHM. Even I am surprised at just how popular BHM has become. We’ll continue sponsoring these threads, as well as look for other threads to sponsor on other forums.