Someone reposted this without my permission or crediting me or even linking to the redbubble site, and their post has over 300 notes. Please reblog this one instead.
While much of the country’s attention in recent weeks has been on the hurricanes striking southern Texas and the Caribbean, a so-called “flash drought”, an unpredictable, sudden event brought on by sustained high temperatures and little rain, has seized a swathe of the country and left farmers with little remedy. Across Montana’s northern border and east into North Dakota, farms are turning out less wheat than last year, much of it poorer quality than normal.
Most farmers in and around the Fort Peck Reservation agree that climate change is to blame for the sudden drought and ruined crops, but that doesn’t change the fact that farmers and others who make their living off of agriculture are now subject to shifting political winds and strained debate around the issue.
“This is unprecedented,” says Tanja Fransen of the National Weather Service in Glasgow, a larger city just up the road from Fort Peck. “This is as dry as it’s been in recorded history and some of our recording stations have 100 years of data. A lot of people try to compare this to previous years, but really, you just can’t.”
Adnan Akyuz, the state climatologist for North Dakota, describes the unusual drought in terms that are reminiscent of descriptions of deluge brought on by Hurricane Harvey. “It is safe to say, we got into it very fast, which caught us off guard and we didn’t know it was going to continue,” he says.
Akyuz said that March through July was the third-driest five months on record in North Dakota since 1895, a dire situation impossible to predict given traditional methods of weighing snowpack with average seasonal temperatures to monitor for potential drought. But in the future, unpredictable may be the best prediction.
so how about that guardian idiot thinking there was a part in 1984 about tiny trains
wtf? Far was this?
twitter user pixelatedboat posted a joke 1984 quote and some idiot from the guardian thought it was real and actually quoted it in their article that they got paid too much to write
So my grandmother and I went into town today to hit up the Walmart for corn meal. She warned me that a lot of brands mix a little wheat flour in, so we’d have to check the ingredients. Since Deacon doesn’t have any experience with corn meal, I figured I’d give him a little test and have him check the bags before we looked at the ingredients. He alerted to every bag on the shelf.
My grandmother thought this was the Best. Thing. Ever. She was so delighted to have him alert and then she’d look at the bag and say “yes! he’s right! check the next one!” (video is him checking the second to last one on the shelf). Because of this we gathered quite a crowd of spectators, one of which was a store employee, who ran a few aisles over and brought back a bag of gluten-free cornbread muffin mix for him to check. He said it was safe, at which point everyone watching collectively lost their shit. You would have thought we’d just won the Stanley cup. Strangers were hugging. It was unreal.
So afterward I held an impromptu Q&A session since none of them had ever seen a service dog before, and then a police officer who was watching told me all about the Malinois their force had, and even got choked up talking about the dog’s passing last year.
Since getting home, my grandmother has proudly told this story to every single person that called the house this afternoon (she’s a very popular lady), whether it be family members, quilting friends, or the preacher, one of which responded, delighted, that her daughter had already heard the story from her husband who was doing the grocery shopping that morning.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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