Hello from Manhattan--Kansas, that is! I'm on my way to Missouri again to do some teaching, exploring, and visiting my family. I spent all week driving and was set to arrive last night. But I woke up yesterday morning with a mild cold (oh no!) and so I extended my stay at the hotel a couple of nights to let it run its course since this is NOT the sort of gift I want to give my family. Thankfully, it's my absolute favorite hotel on the entire route, the Best Western in Manhattan, so if I was going to be grounded anywhere for a couple of days en route this would be it.

On the bright side, I did manage to have a good (outdoor) meeting with the educational director at the Flint Hills Discovery Center, which I recommend visiting if you're ever in the area and want to learn about the native tallgrass prairies of this region. We're putting together some plans for me to do some teaching during my seasonal peregrinations, and a book signing next year when The Everyday Naturalist is out. I'm very excited about this collaboration, because this is a first-rate educational facility and I love everything they're doing there.

Unless this virus decides to take a turn for the worse tonight--which it shouldn't--I'll be on my way tomorrow morning, with a detour over to Konza Prairie for a nice ramble. I've been stuck in the car and indoors way too much this week, and while I got to do a too-short but pleasant jaunt along the Chief Standing Bear Trail Thursday afternoon on my way to Manhattan, I've really been looking forward to my prairie time.

A Game of Thrones, Tyrion II

West of the road were flint hills, grey and rugged, with tall watchtowers on their stony summits.

To the east the land was lower, the ground flattening to a rolling plain that stretched away as far as the eye could see.

Stone bridges spanned swift, narrow rivers, while small farms spread in rings around holdfasts walled in wood and stone. The road was well trafficked, and at night for their comfort there were rude inns to be found.

Three days’ ride from Winterfell, however, the farmland gave way to dense wood, and the kingsroad grew lonely.

The flint hills rose higher and wilder with each passing mile, until by the fifth days they had turned into mountains, cold blue-grey giants with jagged promontories and snow on their shoulders.

When the wind blew from the north, long plumes of icy crystals flew from the high peaks like banners.

June 1

My farmer's market has some vendors selling some awesome plants - for so late in the season I was thrilled!

This is Ironweed vernonia native to the Flint Hills. Super excited to see a vendor getting into the native plants.

My garden has yarrow, echinacea, and now Ironweed. It will produce bright purple spiky flowers in July. I will win the native plant game somehow.

I also nabbed some nasturtiums and a VERY pretty dwarf crepe myrtle (mocha red).

Better yet, this was the vendor's shop. It was soooo cute inside.

Got some decorative peppers to try and maintain some color in my yard as we get into August. I need to find some mums somewhere.

👀 how soon we talking (i have a series of long flights and would much love to download some Top Tier Quality Content)

Currently finishing up a week out of state to help sort through more of my grandma’s things, so I’ve had no time to even glance at the notes. I’m aiming (optimistically) to have chapter one posted on Monday. That gives me a nice buffer day (Sunday) after a ten-hour road-trip-back-home day (Saturday—lol midwest USA*) to look things over. Also, Mondays are statistically good days to post fic and I’m an attention whore. I’m not dropping the whole thing at once; I’ll most likely end up posting twice a week. It’s 22 chapters long, so that would mean an 11-week-or-less posting range.

*general FYI for those not in the know: this is still faster and cheaper than flying for us—lots of Midwest airports are strictly regional, so to get from, say, Dubuque Iowa to Andover Kansas you’ll end up flying from Dubuque to Dallas Ft Worth, and then to Wichita after a layover, and then you’ll drive an additional 45 minutes from the airport because they don’t believe in trains anymore out here. Statistically, of course, driving is much less physically safe. But you can’t see THIS shit from 37,000 feet, now can you?

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flint hills, KS

Flint Hills, Kansas

by u/Sunshine925

Coming Soon: The Walled Garden of Alta Vista KS

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i think this quote is really interesting in retrospect because flint thinks he's talking about himself here but really he's predicting silver

Odysseus, on his journey home to Ithaca, was visited by a ghost. The ghost tells him that once he reaches his home, once he slays all his enemies and sets his house in order, he must do one last thing before he can rest. The ghost tells him to pick up an oar and walk inland. And keep walking until somebody mistakes that oar for a shovel. For that would be the place that no man had ever been troubled by the sea. And that's where he'd find peace. In the end, that's all I want. To walk away from the sea and find some peace.

like yes, this is what flint thinks he wants at this point but by the end i think he's fully realized that he does not want to walk in land and that that would not bring him peace. like for flint that's his nightmare right but for silver that's his primary motivation in s4 in particular but in the entire show really. he's always trying to leave, to leave nassau to leave the war, and he can't! it won't let him go he can never find that place where an oar looks like a shovel and so he's stuck at sea for over a decade until he can finally go home (wherever that is) and walk away from the sea and the treasure and flint's ghost. flint is never stuck at sea though, in either ending he's always stuck on land whether it's locked beneath the dirt of a shallow grave on an island that no one knows where it is or locked behind the gates of a plantation he can never leave

Me literally every time I talk to anyone: Black Sails is the greatest tv show ever made. It is the pinnacle of queer representation. It is the ultimate example of storytelling as a narrative theme and medium for the story. It is about queer people with blood on their hands, fighting to destroy the systems of oppression that want them dead. It is about intersectionality. It’s about systems of power. It’s about radical liberation. It’s about gay pirates. It is poetic cinema, it is high art. Flint with blood on his face, Silver’s transformation, Miranda’s everything, Anne’s sexuality, Max’s quest for power, Jack being Jack, Eleanor’s fate, Vane’s indenture, Madi’s speech to Woodes Rogers, MEDITATIONS BY MARCUS AURELIUS/ KNOW NO SHAME -