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:

This past week has shown both the ugly and good sides of America.  First the ugly.  Sate legislators in two states passed laws that had no purpose other than to discriminate against LGBTQ people, or protect those that do.  In Georgia, it was in the form of a religious freedom bill.  This on its face oriented religious organizations from having to do anything against their beliefs.  That is fine and dandy, and that is already federal law.  It also extended the protections to anyone acting on their religious beliefs.  That is the issue.

Now that I have had a week to recover, and an still trying to catch up on sleep at that, it is time to write up a bit about the festival.

It honestly got off to a slightly shaky start as we were waiting for local members to arrive from work.  So the opening rite had to pull from some of the other talent present.  It was done, and the trance journey that was used as part of the rite did its job.  The opening dinner and then social time were good, and we all went to bed late.

Next weekend will be the first festival that is run by my grove.  Weirdly enough, the things u worried about when planning in August were no problem, the things I thought would go smooth didn't.  My worries at the start were the obvious ones.... Would we get people?  Would we get enough workshops?  Would we meet our obligation to the hotel?  Well, we got 22 different people showing up, some I have never met before.  We also met our obligation in food and rooms to the hotel.  Workshops also were not a problem as we have 2, possibly 3 that were shelved.

There are many ways that we can give back.  Now that I have some "free" time, I have gone back to doing something that I last did about 4 years ago.  That is volunteering with Project Gutenberg.  How?  Well I'm helping through their Distributed Proofreaders program.  Yes, for those of you in ADF, another DP I may use that is not what you think it is.  You can find out more about this project at: http://www.pgdp.net/c/

When the news broke last week about the death of Antonin Scalia, I quickly saw my social media feeds explode with people happy with his death, and the political banter that a new judge should be appoint or not.  I'm not going to get into the politics of this, nobody wins with that.

Back in 2006, I began a journey that I did not fully realize how it would shape my life.  I started the Clergy Training Program of ADF.  At that time, we really didn't have a program, we were using the Generalist Program as our first circle.  Over the next couple years we added new circles, and then we rearranged the courses and added a few more.  The program itself surely has changed since I first started working on it.  I have survived these changes, and did get everything done to get the old version of the CTP completed before that was sunset...