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[glazeddiamonds]

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[sharkspez]

🇺🇸 American Candidate: Donald Trump 🐘

😙 Flirting with presidential runs in 2000 and 2008, Trump kept the 🇺🇸 nation guessing. But in 2016, he would finally take the 🤿 plunge and run for the 👔 highest office.

[starrymoissanite]

[lancerlovesick]

The Private Conference

(this lovely moodboard was created by @vintagedebutante ♥︎)

Pairing: President John F. Kennedy/Petite!Reader

Summary: As Cold War tensions rise, President John F. Kennedy calls one of his secretaries into the Oval Office to help him relax.

Word Count: 2.8k

Further Info: 18+, includes swearing and smut, specifically oral sex

A/N: happy Fourth of July, everyone!! i simply cannot think of a more patriotic way to celebrate than posting a fic about America’s hottest president. in this one, i tried to combine a few different requests, including one asking for the setting to be in the Oval Office, one asking for an angry/angsty Jack, and one asking for the reader to be on the petite side. i hope this fic at least somewhat does justice to those amazing ideas, and i hope you all have a wonderful, safe holiday! ♥︎

You froze for just a moment, almost like your shoe had caught on the carpet, when you stepped into the Oval Office and saw the President on the phone. This wasn’t uncommon—in fact, you’d estimate that at least half of all the “private conferences” you’d had with him since becoming his secretary had been interrupted, at some point, by a call. Typically, it didn’t put a damper on things (though you liked to groan and pout up at him whenever the phone rang, but that was only because you liked the way he would give your nose a playful, reprimanding pinch and tell you to “hush now, baby”). In all honesty, it made you feel oddly powerful, like a glamorous concubine of old, to sit with this big history book figure and listen while he discussed Castro and Khrushchev and all the other monumental responsibilities he carried on his wide, ex-Harvard-football-player shoulders.

On this particular afternoon, however, you immediately picked up on the fact that his call was putting him in a very bad mood. You knew tensions had been heating up with Cuba (you weren’t let in on any of the specifics, but you figured whatever threats Castro was making must’ve been pretty severe because, recently, you’d noticed your coworkers in the West Wing laughing less and pointlessly bustling around more), and you figured that was what the President’s call was about because you’d never seen him glower quite like he was now. His eyes were solid stone as he tracked you across the royal blue carpet; it was almost like he couldn’t truly see you through the dark film shadowing his gaze—he didn’t even offer you so much as a wink or a little throwaway smile.

As you came closer, you decided to test the waters and cast your usual finger-twiddling wave his way, but the only response you saw, and the only confirmation you got that he’d even registered your hello, was his eyebrows suddenly furrowing—drooping, almost—down his brow, as if your wave had actually stolen energy from him somehow. You quickly dropped your hand back to your side. The President was in serious need of some de-stressing today.

“Here’s the problem I have,” he was telling whoever was on the phone as you came up beside his looming Resolute Desk. “You can’t give me a definitive answer as to how long that’s gonna take.”

As he listened to the little voice (voices?) that jabbered away in response, he slowly swiveled in his chair to face you—and you supressed a delighted shiver. Since he was so tall (or maybe because you were so pitifully short), the two of you were exactly at eye-level whenever he sat down, and at this proximity, you swore you could feel the hot, agitated energy emanating off of him in thick, nerve-frying waves.

“Well, there’s no sense in you making any kind of official statement,” the President snapped abruptly, cutting the other man off (and making you flinch instinctively, which you normally would’ve been deeply embarrassed about after the fact, but the President hadn’t seemed to notice; at this point he was still looking more through you than at you), “until I can get up there and restore order.” You noticed then that his trademark East Coast accent sounded especially thick today, almost British. He pronounced “restore order” like ree-sto-ah oh–ah-dah, and he spit cigar smoke with every syllable.

Though the thought of turning around and leaving made your ribs clench around your heart with a yearning, almost schoolgirlish disappointment, you knew his needs ultimately came before yours. So, you started to mouth Should I come back later? as animatedly as your lips could manage, hoping you’d finally grab his attention enough to at least get a goodbye, when suddenly, his hand swung out to grab the skirt of your pencil dress and he pulled you, half-stumbling, between his large, knobby knees. Your hand flew to the edge of the desk so you wouldn’t trip over right into his chest (admittedly, if he was in a better mood, you probably wouldn’t have been so quick to catch yourself), and as you regained your bearings, you found yourself sucking in your cheeks to stave off a full-on beaming smile. You should’ve known better than to think John F. Kennedy was ever not in the mood, phone call be damned.

You were close enough to him now that, when you finished smoothing your rumpled skirt and looked up at him, you could smell the confused mix of cigar and minty toothpaste on his breath, and you could see the secret swirls of gray and green surging through the stormy blue of his eyes. He was definitely the most handsome man you’d ever been with—the combination of his boyishly-freckled, chronically-sunburnt cheeks with the square-shaped, no-nonsense masculinity of the rest of his face was undeniably endearing. During the quick half-second you two hung there staring at each other and his pupils (at last!) zeroed in on you and you alone, you felt a sudden sear of jealousy for the First Lady. It must be wonderful, you sighed inwardly, to be loved by a man so attractive. Sure, you were called in almost daily to the President’s office or the White House pool to help him “blow off some steam,” but you weren’t dumb enough to think that was love. You’d seen how he and his wife giggled like teenagers while they whispered in each others’ ears and how, whenever she spoke, he gazed down at her with eyes so soft and tender it made your heart hurt. The two of them simply sparkled. And though you liked to think you’d achieved a certain level of friendship with the President, he’d always made it clear, without ever having to say a word, that no one—not you or any other pretty young secretary, no matter how good you all got at giving blowjobs—could ever hope to reach the height of the First Lady’s pedestal in his mind.

As if to illustrate that very point, the President moved the receiver a few inches from his mouth and tore you from your thoughts with the very first words he’d spoken to you all afternoon, which were: “Don’t waste any time now, alright?” with a pointed glance down between his legs for emphasis. Then he added, “I’m having one hell of a day” and reached around to plant a firm pat on your butt.

And so, you began the familiar routine of stripping off your clothes and laying them neatly to the side—to ensure they’d stay wrinkle-free—until you were wearing nothing but your skin-colored stockings and the cross around your neck (for some depraved reason, the President liked it when you wore that necklace while you sucked him off).

You barely had time to kneel before he was clasping his hand around the side of your head and hooking his giant, hairy-knuckled thumb in your mouth to practically drag your face closer. Your throat tightened around a sharp intake of breath. Lord, he was impatient.

While you were in the middle of unzipping his slacks and pulling his penis out from the big bramble of hair beneath his belly, you suddenly jumped, startled once again as his voice sliced through the room, deeper this time and undercut with a predatory rumbling you could feel in your chest. “That fucker,” he snarled into the phone, which was now balanced between his shoulder and ear. “You oughta tell him he can stick that silly little ultimatum, if that’s what it is, right up his ass.”

Electricity sizzled up through your stomach. The President was going to be rough with you today, you could tell. You almost wanted to thank Castro personally for riling him up so much (you might’ve felt guilty for thinking something like that, but you were so confident the President would never let anything happen to his country that you truly didn’t see why Castro’s threats should be any cause for concern). Why the idea of the President taking his anger out on you was such a thrill, you weren’t sure. You were simply desperate for human touch as fast and hard as you could get it, you supposed—and in that way, if in no other, you thought you and the President were sort of kindred spirits.

You were practically leaning into his palm like a purring cat when he pulled his hand out of your mouth and ran it up over your cheek and back across your scalp to gather all of your hair into a makeshift ponytail. He was muttering into the receiver all the while (“Uh-huh. God, I know. Shit.”), his voice wet with saliva from the two or three painkillers he’d popped absentmindedly into his mouth.

Once your hair was all out of your face, you spit into your hand just like he’d once taught you to and gave the length of his gradually-stiffening cock a few long, indulgent strokes. But to your dismay, he gave absolutely no reaction. You watched, puffing your cheeks out with frustrated air, as he slowly set his cigar down in the ashtray and, like you weren’t even there, began tapping his pointer finger against his teeth like he always did when he was lost in thought—thought that clearly had nothing to do with you.

You didn’t waste any more time before bending over and wrapping your lips around him, eyes fixed frenetically on his face, and you swore your heart itself squealed with joy when, finally, his eyes flicked down to you, and he tilted the receiver away again to let out an appreciative, whistling breath.

You felt your hair tangle around his fingers as he moved his hand from the back of your head to the nape of your neck, and then, barely giving you enough time to adequately relax your throat, he pushed your head down with appalling strength, his tip jamming up into you with enough force to rub the insides of your cheeks raw. Your hands latched onto his knees.

“There we go,” the President said in a soft half-whisper-half-groan that made your inner thighs flush hot. “Atta girl.” Always the one to set the pace, he began moving you hastily up and down.

After working through the first eye-watering, throat-burning few seconds, you thought you were adjusting pretty well—until his hips made a sudden, violent twitch while he was buried to the hilt in your mouth (which was accompanied by a heaving grunt that could’ve been either from pain or pleasure, you weren’t sure), and you hacked a loud, wet cough that made the guy talking in his ear falter and go silent for a moment.

Your eyes fluttered wide. Had the President’s men heard you?

The President certainly seemed to think so, because he suddenly jerked you still halfway up his cock, which only served to send you into a fresh fit of choking, your whole body wracking with every cough. In an attempt to drown you out, the President leaned back in his chair and spoke louder into the phone. “Well, that bastard’s incompetent,” he said, patting his fingers against your cheek as if that would somehow shut you up. “I wouldn’t have him running, uh, a cathouse.” His wedding band burned cruelly against your skin.

Eventually, he oh-so-benevolently relented and lifted his hand from your neck, and you instantly whipped your head up—not so much to catch your breath (you were pretty sure you would’ve gotten ahold of your coughing fit without having to interrupt your “de-stressing” session if he’d have given you just a few more seconds) as to gauge whether or not you’d only made him angrier with all your noise. But to your relief, he was actually smirking now as he looked down at you, his lips twitching like he was holding back a laugh, completely unfazed by the men now clearing their throats and timidly resuming the conversation in his ear. That figures, you thought. The President probably wanted those men to hear you, deep-down. You knew him well enough by now to understand that he occasionally got off on the fact that his bodyguards and cabinet members were plainly aware of how many doe-eyed, obedient women—not just secretaries and interns but Hollywood starlets, too—he had giggling and dropping to their knees at the snap of his fingers.

At least you’d gotten him to smile, though—if not exactly in the way you’d hoped.

After a long pause, during which you were trying in vain to wipe away all the spit and pre-cum that had dribbled down your chin, the President said with an air of finality, “Alright, there really isn’t anything more to say here.” Say hee-ah. You froze mid-wipe and let out an excited gasp.

He responded by scooping a strong forearm under your armpit and hoisting you up onto his lap like you were nothing but a tiny doll, forcing you to clamp your hand over your mouth to muffle a squeak of surprise.

Leaning against his warm chest was like reclining into a giant sofa back as you settled onto his muscled leg. His penis, now only half-erect again, stirred plaintively against the inside of your thigh, seemingly sulky after having been abandoned.

“I’ve got my hands full over here.” The President was grinning widely at his own pun as he took to rubbing his free hand down your body, the width of his fingers splaying across the entirety of your stomach as he inched toward your clit with agonizing slowness. In retaliation, you reached back over his shoulder to grab a fistful of thick auburn hair.

“Call me back this evening with some good news, would you?” was the the last thing the President said before, in a blur, the receiver was slammed into its cradle and his hand was around your neck, his fingers were in your mouth, his hips were twitching up into your backside with an eager mind of their own. Suddenly, you could feel his heart thunking between your shoulder blades and your ear growing moist with heavy, animal-like breaths.

“God,” he groaned as he finally let his hand fall to your clit. “God-fucking-dammit. You drive me crazy, you know that? You dirty little girl.”

He started nibbling on your neck (he’d never actually kissed you—this hungry, barely-restrained biting, like a wolf chomping at its muzzle, was the closest he ever came) and cupping your breasts and tugging at your nipples with the same fiery-eyed ferocity you’d seen when he was on the phone. You and the other secretaries teasingly referred to this do-or-die passion of his as the famous red-blooded Kennedy “vigor” the press always talked about. Though what the press didn’t know, you and the girls always joked, was that this eager, youthful energy—this incessant, almost pathological need to dominate and conquer—extended far beyond just bull-headed political policies.

“They heard you,” the President was murmuring between his little bites. “God, they all heard you. That excites you, doesn’t it?”

Unwilling to admit how right he was, you instead smothered your face in his hot, pulsing neck to cover up a whimpering moan, and then you were twisting around to loosen his tie, unable to stop yourself—when a loud knock banged against the Oval Office doors.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” the President griped dramatically against your ear, making you laugh.

“I can come back later,” you said, more pleading with him than anything, whispering right into his mouth. You watched his eyes flick ravenously around your face as you wrapped your hand around his cock and added, with a small chuckle, “To finish you off.”

“That you will,” he said, “if you know what’s good for you.” Then he gave you that long-awaited wink and grin before wrapping his hands around your waist to stand you back up, and you were pleased to hear him groan softly at the loss of contact.

When you bent down with wobbly legs to pick up your clothes, he offered you his hand to hold and steady yourself on, and you felt yourself blushing at this perversely chivalrous gesture, even though he’d done similar things countless times before and was always unabashedly ogling your body as he did so.

“That knock means I’m going to have to head down to the Sit Room,” he told you then, wearily running his fingers through his perfectly-mussed hair while you tugged your blouse over your head, one hand still cradled in his. “But in about an hour, when I come back,” he continued, “I want you in here, naked and lying on that sofa over there.” He flung a finger towards the parlor area across the room.

You breathed a smiling sigh and shook your head, knowing you’d soon be in your office counting down the seconds. “Whatever you say, Mr. President.”

[libraryofmoths]

Moth of the Week

Large Emerald

Geometra papilionaria

[Right | Middle | Left]

The large emerald is a part of the family Geometridae. The species was first described in 1758 by Carl Linnaeus. Its common name references its color and size compared to other emerald moths. Its species name papilionaria is a reference to this moth’s butterfly like appearance according to Wikipedia. Adult moths rest with their wings angled and open like butterflies.

Description Newly emerged moths in this soecies are pale and dark green color with white patterned bands classed “fascia” which fades after a few days according to Wikipedia. The fascia change into broken lines of white, two on the hindwings and three on the forewings. However according to Butterfly Conservation, the large emerald is the one of the few emerald moths whose color does not fade.

Variations in color include:

ab. herbacearia Men.: the lines are “obsolete.” Orginally described as a separate species.

ab. cuneata Burr,: a large “web shaped” white spot in addition to the usual patterns.

ab. subcaerulescens Burr,: a more blue green color than normal.

ab. deleta Burr,: the “distal” (farthest from of the moths body) part of the moth’s white patterning is “obsolete.”

ab. subobsoleta Burr.: the white antemedian line one the foreign is “obsolete.”

ab. alba Gillm: the moth is entirely white and tinged with yellow.

Wingspan of 5.0 - 6.5 cm (≈2.36 - 2.56 in)

The larvae described as “rather stout, rugose” (corrugated) “the surface shagreened” (similar texture to a type of raw hide), “the head slightly notched, the setae” (bristle or hair like structures) “mostly with enlarged summits.” The larvae is a reddish brown when hibernating to match dead leaves and things and turns a green in the spring after hibernation.

Diet and Habitat This moth’s larvae feeds on birch, such as Downy Birch (Betula pubescens) and Silver Birch (Betula pendula), but also on Hazel (Corylus avellana), Alder (Alnus glutinosa), rowan, and possibly Beech (Fagus sylvatica).

This moth is present in the Palearctic region and the Near East. They inhabit deciduous forests, heathlands, marshland, in settlements close to woodland, grassland, well-established hedgerows, gardens, and parks.

Mating This species is seen flying at night from June to August in Britain. The egg is broad at one end and more flattened at the other with an oval like shape.

Predators These moths fly at night and are attracted to light. Adults occasionally fly in the tree tops on warm, sunny days. Larvae camouflage themselves during hibernation, being red-brown to match dead leaves and twigs and green to match spring leaves after hibernation. Not specific predators are listed.

Fun Fact The large emerald moth has 4 subspecies:

G. p. papilionaria: found in Europe to the Urals, Southwest Siberia, Turkey, Caucasus, Transcaucasus

G. p. herbacearia Ménétries: described in 1859, found in West Siberia - Southeast Siberia, Korea

G. p. subrigua: described in 1935 by Proute, found in Japan

(Source: Wikipedia [1][2][3][4], Butterfly Conservation, Amateur Entomologists' Society)

[weretheones]

All You Got | Part 11

Part 11: New Trails

Plot: Daryl Dixon hadn’t known much beyond anger and loneliness his whole life, until he found family at the end of the world. Everything he grew to care about was ripped away the day the prison fell; so when he recognized you, an enforcer of his loss, hiding in that cabin, he almost pulled the trigger. But after you end up saving his life, he couldn’t find the indifference to leave you for dead, even if you’d been on the Governor’s side. (Mid-Late Season 4)

Series Masterlist | AO3 Version

Paring: Eventual Daryl Dixon x Reader Word Count: 5k Warnings: typical twd content. mentions of death. A/N: hey remember me? pls say yes :D

A day later, you raided the closest town. 

A new multitool, granola bars, some tampons. It wasn’t much, but at least you had the car when the night turned cold. 

And Daryl. 

Those hints of vulnerability hidden behind a surly mask hadn't disappeared yet. And best of all, he could look you in the eye again. Even if you still couldn’t always quite tell what he was thinking, the reaffirming glance of familiar blue laced with a type of gentleness you’d never noticed before— not even in those quiet moments: when he was patching you up, when he was sick with fever— warmed you up better than any sputtering car heater could. 

He’d never forget the prison. The sight of those metal fences shadowing your face. But there was a trail where your feet had landed these past weeks, littered with moments that could convince even a man as stubborn and heartbroken as Daryl that it was the right choice to stick by your side, the shadow of prison fences and all. Somehow, somewhere along the way from that dingy cabin to the car you shared, you’d made it okay. 

So things were okay, too. For a while. 

But the days went on. 

On and on and on…

Limp leaves of brown and red flew in the air around spinning tires. Ahead was a horizon of cracked pavement lit by the thin light of sunset and the beam of headlights. Except for the speeding car, the road was empty. Nothing to see but amber skies. 

Then those slipped away. The sun dipped behind tall trees, and it was only those headlights and the cold moonlight. No walkers. Not even an abandoned car. Just an empty road, no matter how many miles you traveled. 

“Where are we going?” 

For the first time in months, there was an air of hopelessness caught in your lungs. It infected your voice, wrapping around the words like rotten tendrils of ivy. 

Daryl’s grip on the steering wheel tightened. White knuckles. 

He shook his head. 

“I dunno.” 

The bus had nearly dashed all your hopes, but there was still that stubborn bit of you holding onto the far-fetched idea that something was still out there to find. To protect. Though the road had become so long over the days, the idea smaller and smaller as north, west, south, and east blended, and slowly you were disorientated. No more paths to follow. No more maps to trace. 

You could feel your grip slipping, right as the first flakes of snow fell. 

— 

Eventually, he taught you how to hunt. 

The tracks were the softest thing you’d seen in a week, not since Daryl had smiled at you by that river. Thin ovals imprinted in the dirt under a scatter of leaves that you brushed a hand across, gently. 

“Deer, right?” You looked up at Daryl. “How fresh are they?” 

He just shrugged. “Wha’ ya asking me for?” 

You crouched closer to the tracks. They were relatively deep, the edges cut into recognizable prints. With the back of your knuckle, you pressed into the dirt beside them. It gave away underneath, marking an even sharper and deeper print. The earth was soft this morning, warmed by the pleasantly bright sun despite the first fall of snow a couple of days ago. 

The sinking prints could only have been made that day. After sunrise. 

“They’re fresh,” you concluded. “Maybe an hour or two?” 

Daryl smirked, and you soon had one to match it. 

A deer would be more than enough meat for the two of you. The last time you’d had a catch like that, it’d been in the thick of last winter. Taking a deep breath in, you swore you could still smell the stew steaming from your bowl. It was enough to give your step an extra bounce. To give some fuel to that dwindling hope in your chest. 

Things weren’t always bad, even if it felt like everything was slipping through your fingers lately. 

And then an hour later, you were standing over a dead walker and a dead deer, all chewed up. 

— 

Still no home. No direction. 

The air was damp. An almost suffocating musk that infected every inch of the abandoned motel room. From the tacky wallpaper to the mismatching purple curtains, this place screamed road-trip stop. A little strip of a dozen rooms at the edge of an unnamed town dedicated for only those passing through. 

It seemed fitting to spend the night, then. 

“You can’t seriously like those things.” 

Daryl’s eyes found yours, even in the dim candlelight. 

“Love ‘em.” He threw another pig’s foot into his mouth and you cringed. 

“Ew.” 

“More for me, then.” 

That was just fine with you. 

You rolled your eyes and took another bite of canned corn. It was too sweet and a bit metallic from its years in a can, but at least it wasn’t a foot. 

The pair of you had your backs resting against your claimed, and ironically empty, single beds. After a week of sleeping in that car, taking turns curling into the backseat, it was a treat to have a real mattress to sleep on. Even if it was cheap and full of squeaky springs that dug into your spine. 

But somehow here you were, on the floor instead, sharing a late and unexpected meal against dusty, floral bed sheets. 

Daryl insisted on holding watch most nights. A simple thing that always seemed to lull you to sleep faster knowing that he was there, he was watching. You stopped doubting if he would keep you safe a while ago. He always did, after all. But tonight, it’d been your turn to do the same for him, to wait for each of those heavy breaths to come and the gentle flutter of his eyes as he fell deeper and deeper into sleep. 

That walker had almost got him. 

Really almost got him. If you hadn’t fired a bullet when you did, you would have spent the night digging a grave. All for some gas to fill a car you still had no idea where to drive. It was always just the next town, the next house, the next store, the next—

He let you throw your arms around him after the last of the dead had fallen, even if his muscles turned to stone when you did. And he listened after you told him to rest first. Perhaps the memory of that loose, unbridled fear in your eyes had turned him to putty in your hands, for the time being. 

It was only a couple of hours before sunrise when he woke up. He asked you to rest, too. Whatever you still could get. 

The last thing you wanted was to sleep, to give in to your heavy eyelids and fall away from the world. Not when you could still smell the walker’s rot, could still hear Daryl’s heavy grunts. The crack of that bullet breaking through that monster’s skull. No. No, you wanted to be here. With him. 

But you were putty in his hands, as always. 

It'd barely been halfway through his turn on guard when an old nightmare slipped its way into your subconscious. A morbid twist of Daryl’s neck ripping underneath that walker’s teeth into the sky high flames you’d never forget from the early days. As you began to toss, the squeaking of your mattress pulled him away from the window. His chest ached to hear the mumble of your fragile voice around incoherent pleads, and then that name— the same name over and over. 

He woke you up. 

The haunting touch of the dead, cold and cruel, slipped away with the curl of his warm, merciful fingers squeezing around your shoulder. It’d taken more than a few seconds to realize his features weren’t twisted in terror and pain, like all those other faces that you could barely remember anymore had been. Then there was the drumming beat of your heart as you sat up and clung onto him, for the second time that day. 

After you let go of him, he sat back on your bed, quiet and rigid as a statue. Back to his usual, touch-adverse self. 

So you sat there, listening to your breathing slow and the whistle of the night’s air sneaking past that cracked window. 

“I’m sorry,” you finally mumbled, brushing your messy hair away from your face. 

The stream of moonlight that slipped through the break in the curtains reached across your face. He followed the movement of your hand, heard the rumble of your voice, thick with sleep, and seemed to warm back up. 

Slowly. 

He swallowed. “Nothin’ to be sorry ‘bout.” 

You nodded, fear shifting into numbness. 

“You alright?” 

The moonlight fell on him too, highlighting the concern that laced his eyes. 

“Mhm,” you hummed. 

It was about the most you could muster out; you could still feel the ruthless grasp of dead fingers around your neck. 

It wasn’t convincing, of course. That look on his face didn’t let up. 

“I’m okay,” you reiterated with a deep breath. 

His eyes flickered over you one last time before he finally conceded. 

“Alright.” 

Daryl shifted back again, looking down to the bed. The sheets were thrown back. Your legs curled up to your chest. He had this burning thought— one that had been simmering for a while now, that made him freeze up with fear of his own. Would it help to brush that one loose strand of hair behind your ear? The one you missed? Maybe then you’d hold him again. That seemed to make you feel better, somehow. All he knew was it made him feel warm and—

He stood up, somewhat abruptly. 

“I still got a couple hours, if ya wanna…“ 

“No,” you blurted. “No, I’m not— I’m not tired anymore.” 

He nodded and offered an alternative. No prying and no more nightmares. Just distractions. 

That was how the pair of you ended up on the floor. Daryl eating pig's feet from a jar and you playing up your disgust, because the reality was, you’d eaten far worse than pig’s feet in the last few years. 

“Some fresh game, diet soda, pig’s feet,” Daryl smirked as he wiped his hands clean. “You’d have yourself a white trash brunch.” 

“A delicacy,” you teased. 

“More fillin’ than your corn.” 

You rolled your eyes. 

“Whatever. I’ll stick to my corn, thanks.” 

“Your loss.” Daryl took another bite. “Merle ‘n I used to fight over these.” 

You huffed a laugh, “Seriously?” 

“Mhm. He was a sneaky bastard. Used to wait till I looked away, then swipe ‘em off my plate.” 

“Like a dog?” 

He chuckled, “Wouldn't be the first time someone called him tha’.” 

“Oh? He didn’t get along well with the ladies?” 

“Merle thought he did. Don’t think no one else agreed.” 

You gave him a small laugh. Though, truth be told, the talk of brothers, no matter how joking, was starting to weigh on your chest. It always boiled back down to him, and you couldn’t think about him right now— not if you wanted your eyes to stay dry and your heart to beat that steady rhythm in your chest. 

So you backtracked.

“You ate a lot of white trash brunches?”

“Didn't have much else.” 

“Didn’t cook?” 

“Didn’t know how. Didn’t have no one to teach me, neither. Not unless ya count over a fire.” 

Every meal you’d had in the last two years had been cooked over a fire.

“It counts,” you said. 

“Did you cook?” 

“Mhm. Loved it,” you sighed. “I was pretty good, too.” 

“Better than canned soup?” 

“Much better.” 

“My mom used to cook. Can’t remember it much, though.” 

He had a timid look in his eye, and you held your breath. Ready to share your sympathies— which felt all too frequent, these days. 

“She died when I was a kid. ‘Round the same age as Carl.” 

“Who’s Carl?” 

It was Daryl’s turn to hold his breath. 

“He, uh,” he cleared his throat. Shifted in his spot. That mention hadn’t been intentional, it seemed. A slip in memory— that you were new to him. You’d never lived at the prison, never known the people he did. That the only thing the two of you shared, beyond the old stories you shared during quiet nights, were the last two months. 

“He’s Rick’s kid.” 

He had another look. One that made the air smell like rushing waters and moss.

You felt the words bubble up your throat before you even knew what they were.

“The one I—?“ 

“Yeah.” He nodded.

The one you saved.

“Sounded like it.” 

You took a deep breath of that musty motel room air.

“We didn’t have many kids who knew how to use a shotgun. Never mind kill a man.” 

“Carl did?” 

“He had to. Growing up on the road. The first time we fought the Governor.” 

“Poor kid.” 

“He’s tough.” 

“Still. I can’t imagine growing up like this.” 

Daryl’s eyes fell to his fingers, fiddling with his thumb. Your heart squeezed when his shoulders, as broad and strong as they were, seemed to curl in on themselves. Before you could even register your concern for whatever was running through his head, another question tumbled out of you. 

“You think it might be easier?” 

He shrugged. “Ya jus’ get used to it. Shit being ugly.” 

“I guess,” you mumbled. 

But hearing those words, that thick drawl of his tired voice, made something sting inside of you like salt rubbed into a wound. From the small bits he shared, Daryl’s upbringing never sounded easy, or particularly loving. A brother who neglected him most of his life, a mother who died when he was just a boy, and a father he’d never mention. Even if his life had prepared him to survive this sick and twisted world, it didn’t seem fair. 

“It still doesn’t make it right.” 

Daryl didn’t say much after that. You didn’t want to offend him— you hoped you didn’t. Maybe that comment made it obvious you’d been thinking about his past and his family… Those scars. No matter how hard you tried to forget them, to ignore the intrusive thoughts of how they might’ve come to be, the sight was ingrained in your memory. 

So much for lightening the mood. 

It was silent. Long enough for your words to sink into the stale air, and for the both of you to finish your snacks. The empty cans sat on the dusty nightstand to your left and your head rested against the back of the mattress. Your eyes almost closed, too. 

But with that dark silence came those haunting memories again. Flashes of that nightmare. The desperation trapped in dying screams. Fire and blood. 

You stood up. Back turned to the quick look Daryl threw your way, you dug through that bag you packed full after raiding the town’s general store. It was almost bare, save the three walkers you took out, but you managed to find the last of the canned food that now sat on the floor, empty, and a stray sterile pad, kicked underneath one of the vacant shelves. 

“Should change your bandage.” 

“Alright,” he agreed, moving to sit on the edge of his bed. 

It took everything in him to keep his eyes off that pensive expression of yours. Features twisted in contemplation, and a hint of horror, maybe. You tried to hide it from him. In a way, he hid too, concerning himself with only the buttons of his flannel and the leather vest peeling off his back instead of that festering question he couldn’t seem to stop asking. Are you okay? It sat in his heart like a shard of glass, digging deeper and deeper the harder he tried to pry it away— to ignore the urge. 

The fabric of his shirt hung off the side of his body. Enough room that he knew you’d be able to sneak underneath and change his bandage without bother while keeping the rest of his torso hidden. 

As if you hadn’t already seen more than enough of his tanned skin to keep you up at night with unsolicited thoughts of every kind.

Heartbreak.

Desire. 

The bed squeaked as you sat down behind him, feet hanging off the edge as you turned to see the exit wound. You tugged the old bandage off. It was hard to tell what it looked like with nothing but that thin peak of moonlight and the low flicker of candlelight, but with the pass of your fingertips around the wound, you could tell his skin was flat again. No inflammation, no discolouration save that hint of a healing bruise. There was a fresh layer of white tissue where the bullet had passed out of him, which was the best sign of all. You ripped open the sterile pad you found and taped half over the same spot.

Then you moved to the front to do it all over again. Doing your absolute best to keep your focus on the wound and not his watchful eyes, following you as softly as that candlelight danced across his skin. 

“How’s it lookin', doc?” 

As much as he was trying to distract himself from that heavy look on your face, barely relieved with his stupid quip that you spared the slightest smile for, his curiosity was getting the better of him. Weaving in like the roots of a weed. It still felt foreign to concern himself so attentively with someone without that cursed last name of his; Merle was all he gave a shit about before, and even then, his brother usually rejected that care. Called him a pussy for giving a damn. Then they ended up at the quarry, and it turned out he wasn’t entirely heartless once another Dixon wasn’t around to taunt him. 

“Good. I don’t think you’ll need this for much longer.” 

Truth was, Daryl didn’t give a damn about his shoulder right now. Not when your eyes were hazed like they’d been when he woke you up. 

“How do you feel?” You asked. 

It took him a second to remember you meant to be tending to him, right now. Not the other way around.

“Fine.”

He rolled his shoulder as if to prove it. 

“How ‘bout you?” 

Your eyes stilled, for a moment, then snuck back up to his. As if he’d just caught you red-handed. Another hum hadn’t even the chance to slip past your lips, but you could already tell he thought you were full of it. A slight narrow of blue, flickering over the way you'd been biting your lip and your heavy eyes. He gave you a chance to brush it off again, if you wanted.

Somehow that made your resolve crumble away. Knowing that he saw past it all, but he'd never force you to bare it to him, either. But then those walls you put up years ago were ground down to sand, running through your fingers. 

“I don’t have them often. Not anymore.” 

“You said a name,” Daryl mumbled. “Alex.” 

Pouring free. 

You gave a soft nod. Hoped that ringing in your ears would go away as fast as it came on. 

“My brother.” 

Just like that, his eyes were starting to burn you again, so you looked at your hands. In your lap, where you sat on your knees, just next to him. Close enough to wrap his shoulder. Close enough that you could see his own hands resting on his thighs, fingers just brushing against the frayed edges of his torn jeans. 

You picked at the strands of your own, right beside that numb spot on your thigh where a scar was forming.

“I don’t remember it much, but I think it was from the start. When we were at Westwood.” 

“Wha’s that?” 

“It was a middle school just outside of Atlanta. Some army had set up a base there until they could find a way to move us all to Fort Benning.” 

There was a brief moment when his eyes widened. He had a curious stare that forced you to look up before a flash of green sleeping bags and the silver packaging of MRE rations pulled you back into the memory. 

“There weren’t a lot of us. Under a dozen soldiers. Few of us from the city. Most of the kids ran off with their parents— if they showed up.” 

It hit harder than the Governor had stabbed you, right then, that you’d forgotten their faces. Their voices. Their names. Memories shadowed with ghosts who you couldn’t even tell apart anymore… The smell of burning flesh lingered better than their smiles. 

“It went bad quickly.” 

He didn’t ask how. Didn’t need to really, the end was all the same. One day it was gone, and so were they, and the road became your path again. 

“You ever made it to Fort Benning?” 

The edges of his voice had dulled, filed down until the words were nothing but a feather passing along your cheek, beckoning your attention his way instead. Sometimes you wondered how he knew you were picking up the shovel, ready to dig your way into a pit of fear and regret, before the handle ever touched your hand.

You took in a breath. “Yeah. It was nothing but ash, though.” 

“We were headed there. Back at the start.” 

“Fort Benning?” 

“Mhm.” 

“What happened?” 

“Got held up on Hershel’s farm, instead. Rick ran into some guys one day— bad guys. They told him it fell. Badly.” 

Another flash of the dead. 

“It did.” 

You looked back down. 

“Did those bad guys take the farm?” 

“Nah. We left ‘fore they found us. Herd ran us out. Spent the whole winter on the road after tha’, runnin’ from place to place…” 

Ever so slightly, Daryl stiffened. You knew what that meant. 

Until the prison. 

“What was the farm like?” You asked. 

There was a pleading tone to your voice, twirling up the edges of your words in a way that reminded him of the girl who couldn’t stop asking if he’d stay or leave, who would limp behind him after he silently scolded himself for helping you so much. Back when he didn’t care if your leg hurt or not, or at least, was better at pretending so. 

“We weren’t there long.” He shrugged nonchalantly as if there wasn’t a string as taut as his crossbow squeezing around his heart. “Maybe a month. But, it was the nicest place we’d been. Had trees, big old ones. Runnin' water. Fields’a crops and a couple’a horses.” He added that last one even if Nelly had thrown him so hard he wasn’t eager to ride another horse again. “But we were always fighting each other. No one knew what the hell they were doin’.” 

Your brow raised. “Not even you?” 

“Thought I did.” He shook his head. “I tried.” 

A breeze snuck through the cracked window, flickering the flames around you. He took a breath. 

“Still am.” 

“Me too.” 

The shadows cast across your face were softer now. The sun rose on the opposite side of the motel, but he could still see that hope shimmer in your pretty smile. A softer, dusty blue lit up the sky with ribbons of amber dancing across; orange reflecting onto the colour of your eyes he knew so well. Tracing the edge of your curled lips, the curve of your cheekbones. Your hair was getting long, now loose from the toss and turn of sleep. He didn’t see it down often, but it framed your face just as kindly as the light did. 

You took in a deep breath. It sounded less strained than before.

“We should head back to the car.” 

Daryl nodded. 

Then you smirked, and just like that, the charm that made his chest fill with warmth was back. 

“It stinks like pig’s feet in here.” 

—

The wind danced around you, a whirlwind of fallen leaves and that light dusting of snow, sparking like sugar in the sun. The sky was the same as it’d been the last few days. Pale grey clouds with pockets of blue peeking through. The sun’s harshest rays were always hidden away in the name of winter. 

You spared a glance to Daryl who walked by your side, if not slightly behind. Hunter's eyes roamed over the edges of the railroad you passed through, ignoring that crunch of gravel under your feet while he waited for the snap of a branch or the squeak of a nearby rabbit. Crossbow in hand, bolt loaded like always. The sight of him trailing your steps almost made the cold air bite less. 

That hopeless air in you felt lighter than you remembered, too.

Almost fading.

The car wasn’t far, now. Maybe twenty more minutes. The rumble of empty stomachs had sent you behind the motel instead of through the town you looted yesterday, where the train tracks cut through the forest, hoping to find some breakfast before you finally filled the empty gas tank and started on the road, again. 

Ahead, a rust-coloured train car sat on the second track. A few doodles of white and black spray paint coated the sides, but half of them were covered by a hanging banner, beige and held up by four strings. The bold-blocked words SANCTUARY FOR ALL, COMMUNITY FOR ALL, THOSE WHO ARRIVE SURVIVE were painted in a similarly rusty-coloured red. Underneath the banner was a sign, wrapped in plastic but the lines of a map were as clear as a summer day. Blue, red, and green all lead to a black star in the centre-left labelled TERMINUS. 

The pair of you shared a look, your eyebrows drawn together in a mixture of confusion and shock and his eyes narrowed into slits. Inspecting the poster for any kind of warning, any threat, as if a walker was about to jump from behind it. 

“They were broadcastin’ this,” Daryl muttered, after a long and tense moment. 

Your eyes widened. “When?” 

“Before the prison,” he said, sparing you another uncomfortable look before he continued to stare at the carefully wrapped sign. “We heard it on the radio when we were lookin’ for those meds. Couldn’t make it out then, but this is it: ‘those who arrive, survive’.” 

The wind tickled your skin, goosebumps rising and bangs fluttering across your face as you lingered by that sign. In the breeze, a long strap of white fabric caught around your boot, pulled from underneath the train car. You bent down to grab it, brow furrowed at the sight of a used strip of gauze. 

Your heart skipped a beat. 

“Someone was just here.” 

The crossbow was held tighter then, as if he could be any more on edge. 

“How do you know?” He asked through a clenched jaw. 

“The blood.” It looked like Daryl’s had when you changed his bandages every couple of hours instead of days. “It’s fresh.” 

Your eyes snapped to the map again— how big it was. It covered most of the state, by the looks of it. You could roughly pinpoint the prison in the upper left corner and could imagine lines of your own where you’d travelled these months. Between pharmacies and cabins and random sides of the road. 

And whoever had left this bandage… they’d seen it, too. 

“Daryl, look at how far these go.” Your hand traced the lines of railroads, sprawling across Georgia. “This can’t be the only sign. There’s the prison,” you pointed out, “If they have signs across all these tracks then… your people could’ve seen this.” 

Slowly, your hand fell back to your side. The look in your eye was like the sun breaking out from behind the clouds; a glimpse of that brightness he missed so fondly. Sparked by the glimmering hope in your eye, Daryl could feel a flicker of warmth catch in his chest again, and the realization of what you meant sunk in.

“If any of them saw this map, would they go?”

He hadn’t even known he was nodding along until that slight curl of your lip lifted. 

“Maybe we don't need to find them, just this place.” 

Daryl chewed his lip. The lines on the map curved their way through Georgia like vines, crawling through the north, east, west, and south like the ivy he saw across every abandoned building. Who was to say this place was even there anymore? Putting signs up like that, broadcasting their whereabouts for anyone to hear. It sounded more like a last-chance pipe dream than Fort Benning, and he’d already heard how that played out. 

He’d had enough of those soul-crushing losses. Enough fill for an entire life, and then some. He wasn’t sure if he could risk that again. Not when you were just about everything he had left. 

“I dunno. ’S far.” 

“This is our best lead— our only lead.” 

He shook his head. “We dunno ‘em. Dunno if it’s even real.” 

“You didn’t know me.” 

There you were, with raised brows and that look in your eye that somehow reminded him of the forest’s comforts— soft brown fur of nimble squirrels jumping from branch to branch, the bright blue sky breaking through even the thickest trees, green surrounding him like a blanket. 

“And really, where else do we have to go?” 

A forest he’d spend his whole life exploring. 

Eventually, he gave in. A habit he seemed to be picking up when it came to you. 

“Guess it’s worth a try.” 

And there was that smile again, blooming with new hope. 

————————————————————

-> part 12

A/N: omg hi. I took a long and unplanned hiatus. I won't get into it too much but to recap, in case you care/are curious: I went to nyc for the dead city premiere and had a blast, graduated university, started weightlifting (kinda replaced my twd obsession LOL), got really into GOT, and am now back because for some reason daryl dixon being in paris (????) got me going once more. anyway. im excited to continue this series again!! even if it took every cell in my body to finish this chapter LOL. kinda hate it kinda love it. idk. WHATEVERRRR.

more to come. I promise. thank u for reading and being so patient with me <3<3<3 all the love.

if you’re reading this, thank you! I hope you enjoyed this chapter. please feel free to leave feedback, it helps so much and I love to read it. have a lovely day <3

AYG taglist: @fuseburner @itsmeatballworld @rickysgrimes @stevenknightmarc @huffledor-able541 @your-shifting-gurl @hopefulatrocity @strnqer @dreamtofus @fillechatoyante @suniloli @kiaslily @poubxlle @normanplusdaryl @sseleniaa

[tomorrowusa]

There is a lot of emphasis in the news media on Biden's age while almost nothing about Trump's fitness. This needs to change and we should be more active about holding news organizations to account.

In a four day period in September, the cable news stations mentioned Biden’s age 193 times while Trump’s age was mentioned just 56 times. (MediaMatters.org on September 29, 2023.) After this one sided coverage, these same media outlets then polled the voters about Biden’s age and found (surprise!) that voters are more concerned about Biden’s age than Trump’s age. It’s garbage in and garbage out.

There's just a 3.5 year difference between Biden and Trump. But Trump is not the fitter of the two. Being an epic blowhard and blabbermouth is not a measure of fitness.

After Biden concluded his debt ceiling deal with McCarthy in June, the extremist so-called House “Freedom” Caucus members complained that Biden “outsmarted” McCarthy in the negotiations. The House GOP’s most extreme members hate Biden and have zero incentive to tell the truth about Biden’s good state of health.

So even the most extreme Republicans had to admit that they were outfoxed by Biden.

On October 2, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) took to the floor of the House to denounce the deal that funded the government for forty five days Gaetz said: “It is going to be difficult for my Republican friends to keep calling President Biden feeble while he continues to take Speaker McCarthy’s lunch money in every negotiation.”

As for Trump's health, mental health in particular, the evidence of his debility is on full display.

Meanwhile, the mainstream press has largely ignored and downplayed Trump’s declining mental condition and increasing tendency to threaten violence. Probably the only mainstream media piece that accurately described the respective health of Biden and Trump was in the New York Times on June 4, 2023. The pertinent excerpts are as follows: “While in office, Mr. Trump generated concerns about his mental acuity and physical condition. He did not exercise, his diet leaned heavily on cheeseburgers and steak and he officially tipped the scales at 244 pounds, a weight formally deemed obese for his height. After complaining that he was overscheduled with morning meetings, Mr. Trump stopped showing up at the Oval Office until 11 or 11:30 a.m. each day, staying in the residence to watch television, make phone calls or send out incendiary tweets. During an appearance at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, he had trouble lifting a glass of water and seemed to have trouble making his way down a modest ramp. Most striking was Mr. Trump’s cognitive performance. He was erratic and tended to ramble; experts have found that he had grown less articulate and that his vocabulary had shrunk since his younger days. Aides said privately that Mr. Trump had trouble processing information and distinguishing fact from fiction. His second chief of staff, John F. Kelly, bought a book analyzing Mr. Trump’s psychological health to understand him better, and several cabinet secretaries concerned that he might be mentally unfit discussed invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him.”

He's gotten worse rather than better since leaving office.

These aren’t isolated statements. The highlights (or lowlights) of Trump’s deteriorating condition are as follows. Trump forgot who is currently president, and claimed “the Obama administration” recorded the length of his “border wall.” He even claimed **Jeb Bush** invaded Afghanistan and Iraq! Trump appeared confused when he said Jeb Bush was president during the Iraq War. “You know he was a mili — he got us into the, uh, he got us into the Middle East … Right?” In September, Trump mixed up Biden and Obama, and claimed Biden might start World War TWO. Trump even said you need a government photo ID to buy a loaf of bread. At the same time, Trump’s remarks have taken a dark turn and he has repeatedly threatened violence. Trump suggested that General Mark Milley should be executed. If anybody else had said that, they would be getting a visit from the FBI. The fact that this isn’t being treated as major front-page news is astonishing to me.

Trump makes threats to media moguls and they go easy on reporting his delirium.

The run away front runner for the GOP presidential nomination said Comcast, the owner of NBC and MSNBC, “should be investigated for its ‘Country Threatening Treason’” and promised to do so should he be re-elected president next year. Why does the press continue to cover up Trump’s poor health when he has promised to go after them? How can they be so stupid? It’s pretty wild that, of the two leading presidential candidates, the guy found liable for rape and who is facing ninety one criminal indictments isn’t the one who is facing calls to step aside for someone else to run. The mainstream media has lost all sense of scale and proportion. The media fixation with Biden as opposed to this clearly impaired guy is journalistic malpractice.

Psychologist Mary Trump, Donald's niece, called her uncle a "dangerous presence" on Australia's ABC earlier this year. She also said he was essentially "an insecure little boy who seeks attention".

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Ask your news providers why they are seldom mentioning Trump's mental health in their coverage. They should not be normalizing his threats against people and his bizarre erratic comments.

[plumslices]

this may not be smthing you deal with in your niche idk but my mom and i inherited a pretty big oval fiamond recently and are trying to figure out a semi modern white gold setting for it . any recs? i really love your style so Let me know! what ud do 💋

1. Id do something jade trau-like id fully rip off something bc shes a zionist but i used to fw her she was doing toi et moi before it was cool

2. A bombe style ring east west set it in 18k maybe add two of your birthstones small on either side or on the inside of the band so only you know

3. Have jenna katz design something 🤤

[uwlmvac]

This intriguing feature was uncovered in 2009 during excavations in a former cultivated field in the Sand Lake Archaeological District near Onalaska. The soil within the feature was dark, like a storage or refuse pit, but the size and shape suggested it was something different--a semisubterranean, keyhole-shaped house. The feature measured about 5.4 by 3 meters (17.9 x 9.8 feet) and consisted of an oval main area and a “ramp” on the east side that extended to the north. It was 36 centimeters (just over 1 foot) deep. The  dashed line shows the rough outline of the feature. Rodent disturbance had obscured part of the boundary.

Within the possible house, a deep basin-shaped feature along the west wall contained a small grit-tempered pottery sherd and two silicified sandstone flakes. Angelo Punctated and Madison Cord-Impressed pottery found within the house-like feature suggested a Late Woodland date, but few other artifacts were encountered as well. Some shell-tempered sherds were found at the top of the feature, but they might have come from a later, unrelated Oneota occupation. No postmolds were discovered in or around the feature, but if they were present, they could have been destroyed by a later occupation at the site or by plowing. A similar basin--possibly a winter house--related to the Late Woodland Effigy Mound culture was excavated in Vernon County in 1996. Link to Cade – Winter House Basin - https://www.uwlax.edu/mvac/past-cultures/specific-sites/site-snippets/?letter=c&term=248784.

[toomuchracket]

please elaborate on the politician!matty idea I beg

oh my god the lore could go DEEP here. like hello hi what if you meet doing a law/politics degree at uni and you initially cannot STAND the cocky little messy-haired chatterbox and then you work on a project together and realise you make an excellent team and you know what he's really fucking hot and ok yeah fine you'll go on a date with him and then you're a thing. you go into a law career, he goes into politics. you're ridiculously in love, so you get married. maybe you have a kid or two. idk!! you both progress well in your fields, supporting each other at every turn, still as in love and attracted to each other as you were all those years ago. matty gets a notion to run for office, you take up a senior teaching/course coordinating role at a prestigious university (this is very early the west wing). he ropes you into helping with the campaign, because you're the smartest person he knows; he LOVES how smart you are, can't resist you any time you show it or your work pays off (👀). and by god, does it pay off - he's elected president, for god's sake, and his speech makes reference to the fact that "i wouldn't be standing here right now if not for my wife (and family), the only thing(s) i love more than this country". the two of you sneak into the oval office during the inauguration gala dinner, drunk on champagne and power and each other, and do incredibly sexy but incredibly filthy things to each other on federal property because neither of you can hold back your urges any longer. and it's a lot of that during matty's (successful) presidency; sneaking between the east and west wings for hookups, joining the mile high club on air force one, maybe even getting each other off under tables at governmental dinners... lots of Romance in all its forms, but the polls are all good for your husband so nobody else gives a shit. very much "good, well-respected people who also Fuck" vibes lmao <3

[rebeccathenaturalist]

How to Identify Trailing Blackberry

Originally posted on my website at https://rebeccalexa.com/how-to-identify-trailing-blackberry/. Click here to learn more about the How to Identify article series.

Name: Trailing blackberry (Rubus ursinus), also known as California blackberry, Pacific blackberry, Pacific dewberry, and a number of other common names.

Range and typical habitat(s): West coast of North America from southern British Columbia to northern Baja California, east to the Cascade mountains, and scattered through the Rocky Mountains in Idaho, Washington, and Montana.

Distinguishing physical characteristics (size, colors, overall shapes, detail shapes): Summer is here, and that means blackberries are ripening on the vine! Here in the Pacific Northwest where I live we have multiple species, all featuring delectable, juicy berries, but only one is native. The trailing blackberry distinguishes itself through a slender, biennial vine, pale green to bluish-purple in color, with tiny thorns all along its length. (Be careful when handling this vine, as the thorns easily detach and become embedded in your skin!) Some vines may exceed six feet in length, and each plant may produce several of these from a central perennial root system.

The leaves of trailing blackberry generally have three leaflets, though one or five may occasionally be seen, and they are dark green above with a pale green to white underside. Each leaflet is oval in shape with a pointed tip and a deeply serrated edge that has larger serrations interspersed with groups of smaller, finer serrations, and generally will not reach more than about four inches in length. This species is deciduous, and loses its leaves over winter before growing new foliage in the spring.

First-year vines are not fertile; they will not produce flowers until their second year, after which they die. Like many other Rubus species, it has a flower with five white petals that rarely exceeds an inch in diameter, and the petals are particularly slender compared to others in the genus. The center is pale green to yellow with several dozen anthers on the flowers of male plants. Female plants, of course, are the only ones to bear small berries about 3/4″ or so long at the largest, which start out green, darken to red, and finally ripen at a deep purple to black. While smaller than commercially available blackberries, they are quite sweet and flavorful when ripe. Technically they are not true berries, but are instead composites of several tiny round drupelets each with its own seed, which is typical of Rubus fruit.

Trailing blackberry can grow quite quickly, and although it may clamber over other plants it generally does not out-compete them to the point of becoming a monoculture. It is also a quite hardy plant and can colonize disturbed ground with ease as long as there is plenty of sunlight. The vines can become a bit of a tripping hazard in places with high foot traffic, but are easily trimmed back without killing the entire plant. In addition to seeds, trailing blackberry can also grow colonies of clones wherever its vine touches the ground.

Other organisms it could be confused with and how to tell the difference: 

In its native range, trailing blackberry is a rather unique little plant. It may occasionally be confused with the invasive Himalayan blackberry (Rubus armeniacus). However, the latter grows on large, thick canes up to thirty feet long that can grow tall and arch over, and which create massive thickets that choke out any other plant life. The leaves of Himalayan blackberry are also larger and rounder–up to eight inches long–and more typically have five palmately compound leaflets instead of three, though three leaflets may sometimes be seen. The flowers have rounder petals, and the berries are much larger, sometimes exceeding an inch in length.

Cutleaf or evergreen blackberry (Rubus laciniatus) is another invasive species found within trailing blackberry’s range. Like Himalayan, the cutleaf species also grows thick, long canes. It is mainly distinguished by its leaves, which have three leaflets that are deeply serrated/toothed and have a jagged appearance–hence the name “cutleaf.”

Black or whitebark raspberry (Rubus leucodermis) has berries which superficially look like those of trailing blackberry. However, once again the canes of this species are thicker and woodier than the trailing vines, and they have a distinctive white to pale purple glaucous coloration. The leaflets are larger than those of trailing blackberry, with first-year leaves having five pinnate leaflets, and second-year having three. The berries are larger and rounder, generally not exceeding 1/2″ in diameter. The overall appearance of the plant is of a taller, more upright shrub than a series of vines trailing over ground and other surfaces.

Anything else worth mentioning? Like other Rubus species, the berries of trailing blackberry are edible, and the leaves may be made into tea. If cultivating this species in your native plant garden, be aware it grows quite quickly, though it can be trained up a trellis with some effort.

Further reading:

Rubus ursinus – Trailing Blackberry

Rubus ursinus – Trailing blackberry; Dewberry; Pacific blackberry

Trailing Blackberry – Rosales Rosaceae Rubus ursinus

Trailing Pacific Blackberry

Did you enjoy this post? Consider taking one of my online foraging and natural history classes or hiring me for a guided nature tour, checking out my other articles, or picking up a paperback or ebook I’ve written! You can even buy me a coffee here!

[darkmaga-retard]

President Richard Nixon stared out intensely from behind the Resolute Desk on August 7, 1974. “I have not cried since Eisenhower died,” Nixon told a captive audience of three, Sen. Barry Goldwater, Sen. Hugh Scott, and Rep. James Rhodes. Nixon had begrudgingly determined he would resign the presidency the next day, and, just prior to the quartet’s meeting, Nixon was marking up a draft of what would become his resignation speech. There was no time for tears; only time to consider what was best for the country and what to tell it.

It was a drizzly, hazy summer day in Washington, D.C., on August 8. Towards its end, at 9:01 p.m., Nixon addressed the nation from the Oval Office. “I have never been a quitter. To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But as president, I must put the interest of America first,” Nixon said in the 16 minute address. “Therefore, I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.”

Fifty years on, America finds itself hurtling towards a critical presidential election. The personalities and plots defining this election carry their own curious similarities to the life and times of Richard Milhous Nixon. Perhaps it really is Nixon now more than ever.

The Richard Nixon Presidential Library, with its annex built to resemble the West Wing of the White House, Nixon’s small childhood home, and (my favorite as a kid) Marine One stationed outside, is the epicenter of my hometown, Yorba Linda, California. My preschool, elementary school, and church were just across the street. So was my favorite deli. The little league fields were a quarter mile west. To the east, Main Street and town center. The trail that runs right behind it was where we’d walk the dogs. In the more than half a dozen times my family moved around Yorba Linda, I was never more than two miles as the crow flies from the Nixon Library. When I was really young, for some reason I assumed every town had a presidential library.

[best-jimmy-buffett-song]

Listen to Beach House on the Moon

Listen to Banana Wind

Propaganda and trivia below:

Beach House on the Moon:

Written for and inspired by Jimmy's experience with his son Cameron during a boat trip in Africa.

Banana Wind:

A completely instrumental track, it shares its title with the album. Jimmy once wrote: "Banana Wind is an island term. It is also the path of my song line. It is a wind not as dangerous as a hurricane but strong enough to blow the bananas off the trees. It comes out of Africa like a rhythm and gumbo riding across the South Atlantic on the Equatorial Current to Martinique & Guadeloupe where it turns towards Hispaniola and the Bahamas until it reaches Florida. There it leaves Key West and does a big hundred and eighty degree turn along the oval shaped shores of the Gulf of Mexico from Cedar Key to Pascagoula to Isla Mujeres, then rides the Gulf Stream north along the eastern seaboard through the coastal hamlets of St. Augustine, Charleston and Sag Harbor until it is pushed East by Nantucket and Nova Scotia and carves a warm path through the frigid waters of the North Atlantic until it washes ashore in Dingle Bay where banana trees also grow."

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Massimo Calabresi at Time Magazine:

Joe Biden makes his way through the West Wing telling stories. In the Cabinet Room, with sun pouring through French doors from the Rose Garden outside, he remembers the first time he sat around the long mahogany table, its high-backed leather chairs ordered by seniority. It was more than 50 years ago, Biden says, and Richard Nixon told National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger to brief the 30-year-old first-term Delaware Senator on the still secret timing of the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. Walking slowly through the halls, the President unspools anecdotes about heads of state: Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Emmanuel Macron. In the Oval Office, he talks about his childhood home in Scranton, Pa., and the 2008 phone call from Barack Obama asking Biden to be his running mate. Biden recounts these memories over the course of more than 90 minutes on a warm spring day, speaking in a quiet, sometimes scattershot way. The impression he gives is one of advancing age and broad experience, of a man who has lived history. Biden leads the U.S. as the American century is fading into an uncertain future, a changing world of threats, opportunities, and power shifts. At 81, he holds fast to a vision that has reigned since World War II, in which a rich and powerful America leads an alliance of democracies to safeguard the globe from tyranny. [...]

Whether this view of America’s role in the world will outlast Biden’s presidency is an open question. Voters face a clear choice this November. Biden calls America’s democratic values the “grounding wire of our global power” and its alliances “our greatest asset.” His presumptive opponent, former President Donald Trump, called for withdrawing American forces in Europe and Asia and has promised, most recently in his April 12 interview with TIME, to cut loose even our closest allies if they don’t do as he tells them. By his own account, Trump sees all countries as unreliable, the relations between them transactional. That sentiment has spread throughout a Republican Party that once championed America’s values abroad. J.D. Vance, the Ohio Senator in contention to become Trump’s Vice President, tells TIME that the D-Day story has become a sepia-toned distraction. “The foreign policy establishment is obsessed with World War II historical analogies,” says Vance, “and everything is some fairy tale they tell themselves from the 1930s and 1940s.”

During his 40 months in office, events have tested Biden’s vision of American world leadership. Alliances haven’t been enough to win a new European war in Ukraine. U.S. power and leverage haven’t prevented a humanitarian catastrophe in the Middle East, marked by alleged war crimes. Putin is trying to assemble an axis of autocrats from Tehran to Beijing. In China, the U.S. faces an adversary potentially its equal in economic and military power that is intent on tearing down the American global order. President Xi has told his military to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027, U.S. officials say, raising the possibility of a dark analogue to Normandy in Asia. Biden doesn’t rule out sending troops to defend Taiwan if China attacked, saying, “It would depend on the circumstances.”

Biden’s record in facing these tests is more than just nostalgic talk. He has added two powerful European militaries to NATO, and will soon announce the doubling of the number of countries in the Atlantic alliance that are paying more than the target 2% of their GDP toward defense, the White House says. His Administration has worked to prevent the war in Gaza from igniting a broader regional conflict. He brokered the first trilateral summit with long-distrustful regional partners South Korea and Japan, and coaxed the Philippines to move away from Beijing’s orbit and provide the U.S. new access to four military bases. He has rallied European and Asian countries to curtail China’s economic sway. “We have put together the strongest alliance in the history of the world,” Biden says, so that “we are able to move in a way that recognizes how much the world has changed and still lead.”

But American Presidents must earn a mandate from their fellow citizens, and it’s far from clear that Biden can. In surveys, large majorities say that he is too old to lead. As he walked TIME through the West Wing and sat for a 35-minute interview on May 28, the President, with his stiff gait, muffled voice, and fitful syntax, cut a striking contrast with the intense, loquacious figure who served as Senator and Vice President. Biden bristles at the suggestion that he is aging out of his job. Asked whether he could handle its rigors though the end of a second term, when he will be 86, he shot back, “I can do it better than anybody you know.” Age aside, Biden’s handling of foreign affairs gets poor marks from voters, and not just for the bungled withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan or the ongoing war in Gaza. While 65% of Americans still believe that the U.S. should take a leading or major role in the world, that number is down 14 points from 2003 and is at its lowest level since Gallup began polling the issue two years earlier.

Biden, who is the most experienced foreign policy President in a generation, believes that role is in America’s interest. “When we strengthen our alliances, we amplify our power as well as our ability to disrupt threats before they can reach our shores,” he said soon after taking office. To judge the merit of Biden’s plan to sustain American world leadership, voters can look to his record: what he has accomplished, where he has fallen short, and how he intends to build on his work in a second term. [...]

Others view all the investment in Ukraine as a distraction from the bigger challenge America faces in East Asia. “Who doesn’t think that $200 billion spent in Europe would’ve been incredibly useful in the Pacific?” says Elbridge Colby, a former Trump Administration Pentagon official and lead architect of the 2018 National Defense Strategy. “Great nations fail,” says Lieut. General Keith Kellogg, Trump’s former National Security Adviser, when “you fix somebody else’s potholes instead of fixing your potholes.” 

Biden says he remains committed to Ukrainian victory. Asked about the war’s endgame, Biden says, “Peace looks like making sure Russia never, never, never, never occupies Ukraine.” But last year’s Ukrainian counteroffensive was a failure. Russia recently has made its largest advances since the opening months of the invasion. Alliance building may have reached its limit, along with Americans’ appetite for funding a war of attrition. Biden’s allies in Kyiv complain he has been too cautious, giving Ukraine enough weapons to survive the war but not to win it. “It’s not a decisive stance,” says a senior official in President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government. “It’s not the way to victory.” On balance, however, even longtime critics are impressed with Biden’s efforts in Ukraine. Former Defense Secretary and CIA director Robert Gates wrote in 2014 that Biden had “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national-security issue over the past four decades.” But on May 19, Gates said that Biden’s response to Russia’s invasion has gone a long way toward repairing the damage of the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. “He gained a lot of credibility with the speed with which he assembled the coalition of partner countries, allies, and friends before, during, and after the Russian invasion of Ukraine,” Gates told CBS’s Face the Nation. [...]

Biden may be right that despite the partisanship, a consensus exists for a values-based, pragmatic role for America in the world. His challenge is to get Americans to focus on that rather than on other issues driven by foreign affairs, like inflation or immigration. Biden denies that his expansion of Trump’s trade war with China will increase prices, and says his only regret about lifting Trump’s anti-immigration measures is that he didn’t do it sooner. His goal in a second term, he says, is “to finish what he started.” At stake is the direction of the world for the coming century. At Normandy, Biden will make the case for what historian Hal Brands says is “the 80-year tradition of internationalism that has been quite good for America and the world.” The alternative, says Brands, would be a “more vicious and chaotic” world where Americans ultimately would be less safe, prosperous, and free, but only after everyone else suffered first. Wrapping up his conversation with TIME, Biden offers cookies from a tray in the outer Oval. “They’re homemade,” he says. Turning to leave, he offers a final salutation: “Keep the faith.” But then he pauses and turns back, as the phrase triggers one last story. It’s about a relative who had his own response to that admonition. And here Biden taps one of his visitors on the chest and says, “Spread the faith.”

President Biden was recently interviewed by Time Magazine on May 28th (2 days before the Trump felony verdict was handed down) and during that interview, Biden touched on his foreign policy views ranging from Ukraine to Israel to China.

Read the full story at Time.

See Also:

Time: Joe Biden's Time interview transcript

[scotianostra]

On 20 May 685 The Battle of Nechtansmere, in present-day Angus, was fought.

This always a battle I like posting about, not the battle itself, the story that happened hundreds of year later, which I will get round to later.

The Battle of Nechtansmere is little known nowadays, but it secured Scotland’s future as a nation. Fought between The Picts and the Northumbrian Angles if we had lost Scotland could well have become part of the southern neighbours we spent so many times fighting.

Latterly known as the Battle of Dunnichen, it was fought in the shadow of Dunnichen Hill, to the east of the borough of Forfar, on the 20th of May, in the year 685

The Picts, led by their king Brude Mac Beli defeated the invading army through their clever manoeuvres. Ecgfrith was drawn off his original route by a feigned Pictish retreat. The Northumbrian army burst through the cleft their enemies had gone through only to stumble upon the Picts fortress. Most of the army were slaughtered by the waiting Picts and King Ecgfrith was slain. After the battle, the Picts buried their dead through the following night. They carried on until 2.30am, requiring torches to finish the rest of the work.

Now to my favourite part of the post, roll on over 12 hundred years to the 2nd January 1950, and a woman called Miss E.F. Smith, and described as a spinster, who was driving home from a party in Brechin at about 2am. Her car had skidded into a ditch 2 miles outside the area due to the treacherous road conditions. She still had another 8 miles to go so she continued her journey on foot. She felt oddly nervous as she walked along the minor road west of the A932, then she saw a number of strange lights in the distance near Dunnichen Hill. Turning south towards the village, she noticed figure in the field to her right, part of Drummietermont Farm. Each figure carried a flaming red torch in its left hand and they seemed to be searching the ground for something.

Miss Smith then saw shapes on the ground exactly like dead bodies. The figure nearest to her stooped down and examined several of these ‘corpses’, turning them over and back again, as if looking for recognisable faces. This scene lasted for around ten minutes, with Miss Smith’s dog barking throughout. Eventually she simply walked away. She only realised that the whole event was peculiar when she woke up next day and thought about it. Later she gave details of the experience to the Society for Psychical Research. She reported that the searchers wore garb like body stockings, along with tunics and flattened oval helmets. They appeared to be moving around the edge of the vanished mere, the shape of which was later traced by archaeological investigation.

Although this post battle manifestation has not been repeated. some motorists passing through Dunnichen on misty nights have caught sight of fleeting human forms which vanish before their cars hit them.

There is some skepticism as to how real Miss Smith’s sighting was. She was travelling very late at night and had already walked a number of miles, not to mention suffering a trauma from skidding her car into a ditch. The vision could have been brought about as a result of exhaustion and the effects of the cold. However, the fact that it occurred at the exact site of the Battle of Nechtansmere seems to be too much of a coincidence and it is unlikely that the woman’s dog would react to something that occurred only in his owner’s mind.

[rabbitcruiser]

From Watson Lake to Whitehorse (No. 6)

The Canadian section of the road was delineated with mileposts, based on the road as it was in 1947, but over the years, reconstruction steadily shortened the distance between some of those mileposts. In 1978, metric signs were placed on the highway, and the mileposts were replaced with kilometer posts at the approximate locations of a historic mileage of equal value, e.g. km post 1000 was posted about where historical Mile 621 would have been posted.

As reconstruction continues to shorten the highway, the kilometer posts, at 2-kilometer (1.2 mi) intervals, were recalibrated along the B.C. section of road to reflect the driving distances in 1990. The section of highway covered by the 1990 recalibration has since been rendered shorter by further realignments, such as near Summit Pass and between Muncho Lake and Iron Creek.

Based on where those values left off, new Yukon kilometer posts were erected in fall 2002 between the B.C. border and the west end of the new bypass around Champagne, Yukon; in 2005, additional recalibrated posts continued from there to the east shore of Kluane Lake near Silver City; and in fall 2008, from Silver City to the boundary with Alaska. Old kilometer posts, based on the historic miles, remained on the highway, after the first two recalibrations, from those points around Kluane Lake to the Alaska border. The B.C. and Yukon sections also have a small number of historic mileposts, printed on oval-shaped signs, at locations of historic significance; these special signs were erected in 1992 on the occasion of the highway's 50th anniversary.

Source: Wikipedia