This past week, hell the past month, has been a heartbreaking time.  We have seen senseless killings all over the world.  The shootings in Orlando, bombings in Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and I'm sure many other places around the world.  These deaths were due to perverted, extremist ideology.  

Let me start by saying that I am not trying to get anyone to vote for or against any candidate.  I admit, I voted for Bernie in the Democratic Primary, and I am a registered Democrat and have been since Obama ran for president the first time.  I also admit I have never been a supporter of Hillary, and have never voted for her in any primary or for senate.  With that being said, I am going to explain my fears, and what I hope people will do with the non-presidential races.

Many years ago, I was introduced to a meditation technique by Diana Please as part of one of her intensives.  I can't recall if it was her trance or her seidhr intensive, but that doesn't matter.  The technique has stuck with me and been adapted a few different ways ever since.  The technique is best described as doing meditation or trance through another object or being.

While I may be in a vacation for myself right now, the thought of free time has been on mind.  There have been major changes my life over the past week or two and I now have no long term projects I'm working on.  This means I have a lot of free time I'm going to have to fill with something.

What follows is what I submitted as my report as Information Manager for the annual meeting.

The last 48 hours or so have been a very difficult time.  ADF saw the resignation if it's newly elected advocate... after only 23 days in office.  His exit was in part inflammatory, but it was revealing some of what he went through.  The response from the others on the mother grove have been predictably dismissive and trying to lessen the impact.  I know how this goes, I have been on their side and had to make statements for the purpose of unity that I have not agreed with, or which were a selective telling of facts.

The time of being consumed by the ADF website is slowly coming to an end.  Since my last post, we have looked at every page on the website, fixed most of the broken links, and fixed errors in the code that were found.  Cosmetic issues were also handled to make it look and feel the same as what we have currently.  The biggest thing was the mobile responsive theme that now makes it easier to use on a phone, which is amazingly where I use it the most.

As many of you know, I have been the person responsible for keeping the ADF website working since 2009.  Initially, this meant that I had to maintain a lot of custom Python coding that predated me and was essentially a custom built Content Management System (CMS).  The first thing I did when I gay myself situated was to look for an open source replacement.  I tried all the big ones at the time, and some that sounded good but were difficult to get to work (looking at you Asgard CMS).  We settled on drupal as it is really set up to be for the kind of website we need.

The ADF elections are over, and as I honestly expected, my longshot bid for archdruid came up short with only about 26%of the vote.  A good showing, so I can't complain.  I congratulate all the winners of the elections, and pray for their success in their terms.

This now opens up a lot of time that I had put on reserve until I knew what was happening.  It means now that my festival schedule for the year is pretty much set: