Time to cel­e­brate!  I’m going to BlogHer ’09.  I have been dream­ing and wish­ing for a chance to go for sev­eral months now.  This year, it will be held in Chicago, IL.  Although it’s not quite next door to me, it’s about as close as most major events get when you live an hour from the Cana­dian bor­der in North Dakota. 

Even more excit­ing, is that I will have a chance to vol­un­teer at BlogHer.  I will be a micro­phone wran­gler.  I’m sooooooooooo excited!  In Octo­ber of last year, I attended a con­fer­ence in Texas, and dur­ing most of the con­fer­ence, I was as busy watch­ing the cam­era men, the light­ing peo­ple, and the other peo­ple run­ning around with head­sets on that I may have missed a few good points.  Whoops!

This year’s theme for the con­fer­ence is “In Real Life.” I am look­ing for­ward to this for a few rea­sons.  One is that I love some of the blogs that I read and I am hop­ing to see/meet some of those blog­gers in real life.  Another rea­son is that I am look­ing for more blogs to read (although one could make an argu­ment against this based on my 700 unread posts in my Google Reader right now), and it’s always fun to read a blog of some­one you know in real life.  Finally, I’m try­ing to fig­ure out how to get to know more peo­ple in the blog­ging com­mu­nity.  Some of my friends blog, but most of them do family/kid/picture blogs.  My blog is a lit­tle dif­fer­ent in that I tend to edi­to­ri­al­ize on top­ics rather than  report­ing what we did or show­ing pic­tures from a fam­ily gath­er­ing.  I am hop­ing to learn a thing or two about this at the conference.

Are any of you going to BlogHer?  Do any of you have any expe­ri­ence or knowl­edge about down­town Chicago?  If so, I’d love to hear from you.  I’m look­ing for a room­mate for the con­fer­ence and some leads for some­where to stay the night before and after the conference.

After a break, I’m back!

Nothing’s wrong.  Noth­ing hap­pened.  I just felt like I needed a break, and so I took one.    I’m not sure it was refresh­ing or reju­ve­nat­ing, but boy have the blog posts been pil­ing up in my mind!

I should have plenty to say for the next sev­eral days.  Check back!

After writ­ing the last post about my choco­late and cof­fee exper­i­ment, I checked my Green and Black choco­late, and to my dis­may it was not fair trade cer­ti­fied! Appar­ently, only their Maya Gold choco­late is both organic and fair trade cer­ti­fied. I went down to my local nat­ural foods store, and I found that there were actu­ally very few choco­lates that were both organic and fair trade. I may have to do a lit­tle online shop­ping for some chocolate

I also wanted to men­tion that even in the world of envi­ron­men­tal­ism, green liv­ing, and social jus­tice, the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of fair trade does have two schools of thought. One is that it is a good start in pay­ing peo­ple what their prod­ucts are worth and in ensur­ing that peo­ple work in a well main­tained envi­ron­ment with humane work­ing con­di­tions. On the other hand, some peo­ple feel that the fair trade cer­ti­fi­ca­tion leaves out a good num­ber of peo­ple who are fol­low­ing all the prin­ci­ples and pro­ce­dures of fair trade, but they sim­ply can­not afford the certification.

I under­stand both ways of think­ing. I know that there are prob­a­bly farms and pro­duc­ers who are fair trade in all prac­tices and prin­ci­ples and every­thing but cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. I also know there are prob­a­bly peo­ple who are fair trade in name only, that is they are doing the min­i­mal amount nec­es­sary to main­tain the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and not doing any­thing above and beyond them. So, I’m not say­ing that fair trade ensures that you are buy­ing from the best source or that your money is being used in the most wise way. I do think it’s a good begin­ning though. More impor­tantly than trust­ing a gov­ern­ment or an agency to cer­tify the ori­gins of your food is doing some research your­self and ask­ing questions.

Meant to pub­lish this last night but instead of pub­lish­ing I saved it in my drafts folder