My brother, Hugh, is visiting from Maryland. He’s on the right. That’s John Silveira on the left. Lenie and I are in the background. Hugh and I play golf every day when he visits. Since he’s as bad as I am, I at last have a chance to beat someone.

Been thinking a lot about the H1N1 virus lately, doing research on whether or not my kids should get the vaccine when it becomes available in two weeks. Annie just announced she’s pregnant, which puts her in the highest risk category for swine flu so I’m particularly interested in whether or not she should get it. The CDC says of the 700 pregnant women who have confirmed H1N1, 27 have died. That’s a very frightening statistic.

Coincidentally I’m rereading Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. He says European diseases killed 95% of native peoples in the Americas within about a hundred years of Columbus’s arrival. The Indians had no resistance to Eurasian diseases like smallpox, flu, cholera, measles, and a host of others, so they died in droves. H1N1 is fairly mild now but it has the potential to mutate and become more deadly, and modern humans, just like the Indians back in 1492, have no defense.

I’ve asked Silveira to help me with the research. I’ll let you know what I decide.

My daughter, Annie, is getting a good taste of what it means to be the managing editor of BHM. Her husband, Erik, is home on a two-week leave from the Marine Corps, but she has already spent the first week on deadline, working many, many hours trying to get this issue ready for print. We should finish up late tonight.

This is the 132-page issue I wrote about last post. It’s very good. Although I wasn’t involved much with the work of deadline, I did write a 12-page article about the history of BHM. It came out pretty good, and we’ve lead the issue with it. Long-time readers will especially like the behind-the-scenes goings-on of the first few years.

It also looks like this special anniversary issue will be in Borders bookstores for the first time in several issues. An agent of Borders has been calling me for about a month in an effort to get BHM back into their stores. I had cancelled BHM’s contract with Source Interlink, which has the sole right to supply magazines to Borders, after Source filed for bankruptcy. Borders got a reorganized Source to offer me a real nice contract, with better payment terms and a lot more security, so I signed for one year, rather than the usual two or three years. Part of the deal is that Borders offered to give BHM a free “pocket” for this issue,  which is a special display in their stores’ newsracks that will highlight our magazine. I thought it was an exceptional offer, so I signed.

Lenie in Fort Collins for a Show

Lenie missed this last day of deadline by flying to Fort Collins, Colorado, early this morning to display the magazine at a Sustainable Living Fair this weekend. If you’re in the area, drop by and say hi and tell her we’re working hard here. I just got her “safe arrival” phone call from the motel. The Rocky Mountain Sustainable Living Association has been doing this show for 10 years, and we’ve always meant to go but it always seemed to confict with deadline. It should be pretty busy since a lot of folks there probably never heard of BHM.

Golf in Klamath Falls

I’m going to celebrate finishing this deadline by taking three members of the Backwoods Home Youth Golf Team over to Klamath Falls tomorrow and treating them to a round of golf at the Running Y, which may be the prettiest golf course in Oregon. We’ll stay at the Olympic Inn, a motel that costs $119 but includes a big free breakfast, soup and sandwiches in the late afternoon, and fresh cookies in the evening. That pays for the motel room for these big eaters.

I got a couple of new Bobby Jones wedges in the mail the other day. My first shot with the sand wedge (56 degrees) put the ball within two feet of the pin from 50 yards.

Back to work!

Excerpts from the September/October (Issue No 119) issue of BHM are now on the website, which means we are now preparing our 20th year anniversay issue — No 120.

We think we may expand the issue by two signatures (a signature is 16 pages), which we’ve never tried before. The biggest BHM has ever been is 116 pages, which we’ve done only a few times. This 20th year anniversary issue would be 132 pages.

Not certain of this yet! We’ve already got the issue ready for our usual 100 pages. Oliver Del Signore, the webmaster for our website, came up with this idea of doing a REALLY BIG issue to celebrate. Very tempting. We’ve got a lot of good material we could use.

It’s nice to be able to think out loud like this: In a day when magazines are dying like old flies, we’re thinking of expanding — just to celebrate our success.

You might want to read my editorial about why magazines and newspapers are dying. Readers Digest just died . Utne Reader is actually raising prices drastically in a dramatic attempt to survive.

The world is changing for magazines, and BHM is one of the big winners.

We’re in the last day or two of deadline for Issue No. 119. I just finished my commentary, and Annie is putting the final touches on the rest of the issue. Hopefully, we can finish by midnight but I’m not sure. As usual, it’s a mind-boggling amount of work, but Annie is bearing most of the load now.

Here are a couple of nice reviews of BHM and its website. The “Libertarian rants” referred to are, of course, written by me:

http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2009/02/26/magazines-and-websites-about-homesteading-and-self-sufficiency/

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/07/practical_ideas_for_self-reliant_li.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890