Possibly you’ll have noticed the advertisement over there in the right hand sidebar, right underneath the stunning photograph of your friendly Journal Blogger, and will have rightly deduced from that that The Journal Blog is a part of the BlogHer Ad Network.

BlogHer would like it a bunch if they could find out more about you — the talented and lovely readers of The Journal Blog.

Much more to the point, potential ad buyers for the network want to know more about you.

So, the folks at BlogHer — as well as your friendly Journal Blogger — would be much obliged if you would take a minute or two out of your busy schedule to click on the ad over there and take the as-painless-as-they-could-make-it survey.

(We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming … )

The 9th Annual Minnesota Small Business Conference and Expo was held yesterday, more or less on schedule, and a good time was had by all.

Well, a good time was had by me. I really can’t speak for anybody else.

Tom Gegax delivered the keynote address and, naturally, he had a number of interesting things to say about starting and running a business. Gegax was introduced by MN Secretary of State Mark Ritchie. Mr. Ritchie is as excited about small businesses as every other politician in the world and, from what I’m told by residents here, possibly he means it.

And there were various educational sessions on all kinds of aspects of the same.

Sadly, I was unable to blog the event because (believe or not) the lovely and relatively new Minneapolis Convention Center does not have wireless.

Go figure.

So, now that is over with — and from the preliminary feedback I received, the folks who attended the two presentations I gave found them both helpful and informative — I can catch up on my email and update this blog.

I’m not back in NY yet but at least I can stop neglecting you all.

False alarm.

Which isn’t to say the National Weather Service was whistling dixie. Mudslides have closed sections of I-88 and I-81 down in Binghamton (about 40 miles south of here), and people are being evacuated to shelters down there.

First thing I did this morning, of course, was check the water level of the Susquehanna (which I can see from my bedroom window). It’s high but still at least 10 feet from flood stage. So, I’m not expecting to be making any hasty exits today.

Whew! That’s not how I wanted to end my week, so I’m happy.

(We now return you to your regularly scheduled blogging.)

I just heard about this, so I thought I’d slip in here after hours … just in case.

Possibly you’ll remember that The Journal Blog went dark for awhile back in late June and early July when the Susquehanna and Delaware Rivers flooded, washing me out of my home office and into the prehistoric land of no ‘Net, no phone and no electricity.

Well, we’re under another flood watch:

FLOOD WARNING
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE BINGHAMTON NY
746 PM EST THU NOV 16 2006

NYC017-025-171246-
746 PM EST THU NOV 16 2006

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN BINGHAMTON NEW YORK HAS ISSUED A

* FLOOD WARNING FOR
THE SUSQUEHANNA RIVER AT BAINBRIDGE
* FROM TOMORROW AFTERNOON UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE
* AT 06 PM THURSDAY THE STAGE WAS…5.3 FEET
* MINOR FLOODING IS FORECAST
* FLOOD STAGE IS 13.0 FEET
* FORECAST TO RISE ABOVE FLOOD STAGE BY TOMORROW AFTERNOON AND
CONTINUE TO RISE TO NEAR 14.0 FEET BY EARLY SATURDAY MORNING.
* AT 15.0 FEET…FIELDS BEGIN FLOODING IN SIDNEY

As of right now, it doesn’t sound all that serious. For the record, Bainbridge is another village about five miles or so from here. Meanwhile, according to what I found at Weather.gov, Sidney should only get about another 3-4 inches of rain before it starts snowing (mixed blessing, since we still don’t have a working furnace).

But you know how it goes — once flooded, twice shy.

Personally, I’d be just as happy if Mother Nature doesn’t choose to keep washing my basement for me.

With any luck, I’ll be able to update you on the weather situation tomorrow. We’ll all hope this turns out to be much ado about nothing.

[tags]weather, flooding[/tags]

I supposed, if I’d thought about it, I would have seen this coming. Nobody is saying anything interesting this morning; everybody is still talking the elections to death even though there will be nothing truly relevant to talk about until after the polls start closing.

Okay, folks, I’m off to Washington for that FTC shindig I mentioned to you last week. I invite you to watch me spew forth microbusiness wisdom on Wednesday afternoon or, for that matter, watch any of the sessions that look appealing to you.

I have reason to believe I’ll have access to the ‘Net while I’m gone, so that I expect to get in here and update between now and the time I get back later this week.

Ciao, baby!

‘A few days,’ she said. Ha!

Well, your friendly Journal Blogger is back in her extremely damp house. Actually, we have been home since last Monday (7/3). We were very fortunate; only our basement and our garage got flooded. Many of our neighbors were much less fortunate and sustained flooding of as much as three or four feet on their first floor.

All is not exactly honky-dory, though. For one thing, we are still without electricity. (Never take electricity for granted! Almost everything you do on a day to day basis, from checking your email to taking a hot shower, is probably dependent on electricity.) Everything we had that you normally find in a basement got totalled. We’ll have to replace the oil furnace, the wood furnace, the water heater, the fuel tanks (which ruptured, coating everything in heating fuel … yum!) and the fuel in them, the washing machine and dryer.

Taking a longer view, the village of Sidney was one of the hardest hit in the state from this flooding. Walton, another village about fifteen miles away, got the most damage to its infrastructure but Sidney has the dubious distinction of being the place with the largest number of displaced people. Unconfirmed reports have it that some 300 homes have been declared ‘unsafe’ and, of those, about 150 or so have been condemned.

The economic impact on the village and, specifically, on our small businesses is shaping up to be a very interesting story in and of itself. Naturally, I’ll be covering that in the next issue of The MicroEnterprise Journal that I manage to get out.

We expect to get the power turned back on by the end of this week. I’ll hope to get that issue out next Monday.

Internet withdrawal is probably as painful to watch as it is to experience.

Anyway, we are all well here. Eventually, we’ll get our house put back together. Our thanks for your prayers and good wishes. And, again, I’ll update here when I can get to a computer in a ’safe’ building with electricity and an Internet connection.

If you’ve been watching the news over the last couple of days, no doubt you’ve heard about the flooding in the northeast, primarily the Susquenehanna and Delaware Rivers in NY, NJ and PA.

What you may not realize is that The MicroEnterprise Journal is published from my home office in Sidney, in a house that is literally right across the street from the Susquehanna.

We were evacuated on Wednesday morning and have been living on a mat in the Sidney Middle School gym since then.

So, I hope you’ll bear with me if The Journal Blog falls silent for the next few days. I’ll get in here when I can find somebody with power and a working Internet connection, to give you updates.

We’re safe. We’re dry. Rumor has it that our house is still standing. We have been very fortunate.

Holy blogging withdrawal, Batman!

We last left our hero tussling with the evil DNS empire that had kidnapped her favorite domain name and was now holding it for ransom …

It’s been something like two weeks since I posted in this blog (and, if memory serves, I lost a couple of posts in the move). I seem to remember posting something to warn my readers that I was making a major server move and the site might go dark for a minute or three.

Well, what an optimist I turned out to be! Try 16 days …

Lots of bloggable stuff happened between then and now but, in romance and in blogging, once the moment is lost, it’s lost forever.

And now that the site is back, I’ll resist the temptation to post fifteen times today just to make up for all the time I lost.

The Journal Blog will now fall silent for a couple of days … unless I can find a computer somewhere, which is a distinct possibility.

Yes, I know. I really ought to spring for a laptop.

I’m on my way to Washington for a few days. I’ll be attending Women Impacting Public Policy’s Spring Leadership Conference. I hope to get down there early enough tomorrow to attend a hearing of the House Small Business Committee. And the National Association for the Self-Employed is having a press event on Capitol Hill … more on microbusinesses and health care.

It’ll be a pretty full couple of days. And there will, of course, be coverage of at least some of this stuff in next week’s issue of The MicroEnterprise Journal.

What do you mean you don’t subscribe? C’mon, get with the program!

I just love handing myself insanely huge projects just when I’m up to my eyebrows in stuff anyway.

I’m looking at a new content management system that will, I hope, make running this web site more efficient and more user-friendly for me, for my state bureau chiefs, and for you the readers. The software that I’ve found appears to be that rare animal that does everything I need it to do without doing a bunch of things I don’t need it to do.

It’ll take almost all the features currently in place on this web site and integrate them into a single program, and add some new features that should make life swell.

Of course, in order to complete the final installation (which isn’t going to happen for awhile yet), there will probably be a couple of “excuse our dust” moments. I hope to keep those to a minimum. I also am hoping to be able to keep this blog at this location because it’ll be a real pain in the keester to have to run all over the web changing the URI so everybody can find it.

Monday morning housekeeping notes … aren’t they lovely?