I live in a noisy house. Three teenaged boys with their friends spells noise. Boys don’t grow up too fast in the country, either, so they stay noisy for years longer than in the city. Tonight my three boys, two friends, and wife played Lemming, a very noisy card game, on the living room floor for two hours. The dog slept through it all.

Lenie just booked our plane tickets for the MREA Fair in Custer, Wisconsin, June 20-22. As I did last year, I’ll give a free autographed copy of my book, Can America Be Saved from Stupid People, to anyone who comes up to the booth wearing a Backwoods Home Magazine T-shirt, plus I’ll put the person’s photo in this blog. It was a lot of fun last year. If you think you might attend the Fair, click here for the details. I had just started this blog prior to last year’s MREA Fair. Here’s the link to that blog activity and what transpired with the T-shirts.

This year, my whole family will fly to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina first to visit my daughter, Annie, and her family. Then Annie and I will fly to the Fair and do the show while Lenie babysits the grandkids in North Carolina. Longtime readers of BHM first encountered Annie when she was a 7-year-old girl helping me build the Oregon wilderness home that launched BHM in 1989. Annie will be 26 a week after the show ends. She has maintained an excellent blog for the past three years.

Amazing how time goes by.

We made deadline, sort of. Neither my editorial nor Note from the Publisher nor John Silveira’s Last Word column were with the package we Fed-Xed to our Wisconsin printer. John and I finished them up late yesterday and sent them via internet. Very strong issue.

By our next issue we will have switched to our new software, Adobe Creative Suites, to publish the magazine. Readers won’t notice any difference, as this is an internal response to changing technological advances. It’ll be a big learning curve for us, especially me since I resist learning computer programs.

Three weeks ago we had snow in my backyard; today it’s over 100 degrees. Even downtown, at the Gold Beach office, it was 82 degrees yesterday, which is about 10 degrees higher than GB’s typical summertime temperature.