Jill

With everything we are hearing right now about ticks this seems like good information to share. “Here’s what I’ve learned after more ticks than I care to count. First, whatever your uncle told you, forget it. No matches. No nail polish. No Vaseline. No soap on a cotton ball. All of those do the same terrible thing, they stress the tick out, and a stressed tick empties its gut back into the bite before letting go. Which, if you think about what that actually means for a second, is literally how Lyme and the rest get transmitted so you’re not speeding up its exit. You’re making it throw up into you. Fine-tipped tweezers. Grip right where the mouthparts enter the skin, not the body, the head. Pull straight up, steady, no twisting, no jerking. It’ll feel like it’s resisting because it is, the mouthparts are barbed. Just keep the pressure on and it lets go in a few seconds. If a piece breaks off in the skin, leave it alone. Your body pushes splinters out. Digging around with a needle does more damage then the fragment ever would. Clean it with alcohol or soap. Wash your hands. Now here’s the part most people skip: don’t flush the tick. Tape it to an index card. Clear packing tape right over the body, write the date and where on your body it was, and stick the card in a drawer. If you come down with anything weird in the next 30 days, rash, fever, joint pain, that flu-that-isn’t-flu feeling, that tick goes with you to the doctor. Some labs will test the tick itself, which is faster and often more reliable than waiting for antibodies to show up in your own blood. A dated tick taped to a card is one of the most useful things you can hand a doctor who’s trying to figure out what’s wrong with you. The other thing worth saying out loud: if the tick was engorged when you pulled it, and you can’t swear it was off your body within 24 hours, call your doctor that same day. Don’t wait for a rash. Fewer than three out of four Lyme cases even produce the classic bullseye. A single preventive dose of doxycycline within 72 hours of a deer tick bite cuts the Lyme odds way down, and most docs in tick country will write that prescription without giving you a hard time, especially if you walk in with the tick taped to a card and a clear timeline.”

A bricklayer in East Yorkshire has spent 35 years putting up barn owl nest boxes on weekends. This year, the region saw 308 owlets hatch. His name is Robert Salter. He's 56 and does bricklaying full time. In 1990, he saw a piece on the news about a man in Lincolnshire installing barn owl boxes, and decided he'd do the same. He started with five. He now has more than 350 boxes scattered across fields, farms, outbuildings, and trees in East Yorkshire. Every June, he takes four weeks off from bricklaying and visits them with his wife Sue. Scrambling up ladders, ringing chicks, cleaning boxes, repairing the ones the weather got to. He's a licensed bird ringer for the British Trust for Ornithology. In 2024, the region ringed 95 owlets. In 2025, the count was 308. The Barn Owl Trust says that nationally, this year was "pretty poor" for barn owl breeding, but east Yorkshire is the exception, and it's the exception because of one man with a ladder. The barn owl population in the UK was estimated at 4,000 pairs in the mid-2000s and crashed to roughly 1,000 by the early 2010s. The species is still recovering. Most of conservation is one person who refuses to give up.

I visited The Chef’s Garden in Ohio to see firsthand how regenerative farming restores soil health, increases nutrient density, and produces healthier food for the American people. Healthy soil grows healthy food, and healthy food nourishes healthy Americans. Regenerative agriculture represents the future of farming and a cornerstone of our mission to Make America Healthy Again.

Please call & email. #SaveLucy

Ever rediscover an old musician's catalog, and shocked how much you enjoy it? Growing up, I had to endure Hee-Haw episodes every Saturday night with the parents (like many Gen Xers) but only knowing Buck Owens and Roy Clark from corny skits, was a huge disservice. Clark might be one of the top ten guitarists of all time, and I really love Buck Owens' Bakersfield sound. Great stuff to dive into.

Citizenship should mean something. Legal immigration is the backbone of this country, but our open borders have been exploited for too long. The 14th Amendment was never intended to grant automatic citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants. My amendment fixes that, ensuring only children of legal residents receive automatic citizenship and protecting U.S. citizenship from abuse if the Supreme Court fails to act.

No GOP senate leader has ever lost 2 sitting members to primary challenges in one cycle until tonight. Congratulations John Thune.

No American should ever pay property tax. It’s a tax based on unrealized gains and is unconstitutional. Period. Making this an age issue is bullshit. My daughter is a public school teacher and she can’t afford to have a second child because Florida doesn’t pay teachers well and refused to fund paid maternity leave. I’d prefer a break on her property taxes and get another grandchild. The fact that young ppl have to make those choices while foreigners come here and pop out 10 kids that our taxes pay for while our own children stop having kids bc it’s too expensive IS FUCKING RIDICULOUS. .@GovRonDeSantis

KEEP SHARING PEOPLE ! We need to keep her trending till her family gets her back !!🐶💖🐶💖🐶💖🐶💖🐶💖💖

Thune sacrificed 5 senators to avoid passing the Save America Act.

An owl can eat over 1,000 rodents in a year. If you poison the rodents, you poison the owl. And almost every raptor in the US is already being poisoned. A 2020 Tufts Wildlife Clinic study found that 100% of the red-tailed hawks they tested were positive for anticoagulant rodenticides. Every single bird. A follow-up study of 46 hawks, owls, foxes, and coyotes from a Massachusetts rehab center between 2022 and 2024 found the same thing: 100% had been poisoned. Rat poison works by preventing blood clotting. The rodent doesn't die immediately. It bleeds internally for days, becomes lethargic and easy to catch, and gets eaten by something hungry. The poison moves up the food web in their gut, their liver, their carcass. A single bait box can take out an owl, a hawk, a fox, even a bobcat. The pests you're worried about (mice, rats, voles) are the same pests an owl can take 1,000 of in a year, for free, forever, if you let her. Use snap traps indoors only away from pets. Seal the entry points and lock food away. Put up an owl box. Keep cats inside (they get poisoned eating poisoned rodents too). Rat poison sales need to drop to zero.

Keeping Lucy in our hearts 💔💔

Can someone help this guy? A veteran who just wants to bring his dog home? @PeteHegseth @realDonaldTrump @catturd2 @ABC @CBS @CBSNews @NBCNews @FoxNews @GMA #TSandlot #freeLucy #Lucy #SaveLucy

“The demons are very anxious in their pursuit of souls, yet they quickly abandon their prey merely at the name of Mary.” St. Bridget of Sweden 🕊️

GOOD NEWS: A record-breaking 52,019 puffins have been counted on Skomer Island off the Welsh coast, smashing last year’s all-time record of 43,626!

On this day in 1863, Union and Confederate soldiers stopped killing each other for two and a half hours, walked out into the field between their lines, traded coffee for tobacco, sat down together to bury bodies that had been rotting in the Mississippi sun for three days, and then went back to their trenches and resumed killing each other. The place was Vicksburg. Three days earlier, on May 22, Ulysses S. Grant had ordered a massive frontal assault on the Confederate fortifications ringing the city. He believed the garrison was demoralized and one hard push would crack it. He was wrong. The attack went in across open ground into prepared trenches, ditches, and tangles of abatis. In a few hours of fighting, the Union army lost more than 3,000 men killed and wounded. Many of them fell within fifty yards of the Confederate works. A few got inside the works and died there. When the smoke cleared, the wounded were still out there. For one day, then two, then three, they lay in the Mississippi May heat. Some were dead. Many were not. Confederate and Union sharpshooters made it suicide to crawl out and retrieve them. The temperature climbed past ninety. The smell rose up over both armies and settled into the trenches and would not leave. Grant refused to ask for a truce. To formally request one would be an admission that his army had been beaten on the 22nd, and Grant did not like admitting that. He held out for three full days while his own men breathed in the corpses of their friends. On the morning of May 25, he finally sent a note across the lines to John C. Pemberton, the Confederate commander inside Vicksburg, proposing a two-and-a-half-hour cease-fire to bury the dead. Pemberton, who had been waiting for exactly this letter, agreed within the hour. He had refrained from suggesting it himself because he did not want to seem to be showing weakness, or worse, doing a favor for the enemy whose corpses were stinking up his front yard. The note crossed under a white flag at noon. The cease-fire was set for 6 p.m. At 6, the firing stopped. White flags went up along the entire siege line. Burial details climbed out of both sets of trenches and walked toward each other across ground that had been a killing zone an hour earlier. They started digging shallow graves where the men had fallen, side by side. And then something stranger happened. The fighting men, on both sides, came out too. They had been shooting at each other for a week from holes a hundred yards apart. Some had served in the same prewar U.S. Army regiments. Some had been at West Point together. Grant and Pemberton themselves had been classmates. On the Missouri and Tennessee sides of the line especially, some of these men had grown up in the same towns and gone to the same churches. They sat down on the grass between the trenches and talked. Confederates traded tobacco for Union coffee. They swapped newspapers. They asked after mutual friends. Officers found old classmates now wearing the wrong color uniform and shook hands and stood there in the evening light catching up on three years of war. A few yards away, the burial parties were still shoveling. When the cease-fire neared its end, the buglers sounded recall. Men stood up, brushed off their pants, shook hands again, and walked back to their own trenches. The white flags came down. At 8:30 p.m. the firing started again. Vicksburg held out for another 40 days. Grant never ordered another assault. He let hunger finish what bullets could not. On July 4, 1863, one day after Lee was beaten at Gettysburg, Pemberton surrendered the city and 29,000 men. The Mississippi River was now a Union highway. The Confederacy was cut in half. The war's outcome was no longer in serious doubt. But for two and a half hours on a May evening in 1863, the men actually doing the killing put their rifles down, found their old friends in the enemy's uniforms, and remembered they were one country.

🚨 420 beehives destroyed in seconds. 😱 A semi-truck hauling millions of bees overturned on a mountain road near Crater Lake, Oregon, on March 17. Hives smashed, bees scattered across the cold ground in what could have been total devastation. But the community showed up. Local beekeepers, neighbors, and everyday heroes rushed in—not for money or clout—but to save what they could. They rescued colonies, gathered scattered bees, and gave these vital pollinators a fighting chance. This story of resilience comes from Angela Panks, the remarkable third-generation deaf farmer and founder of Home Grown ORX. Alongside her husband Jared, Angela leads Deafining Cannabis, empowering the deaf community through regenerative farming, cannabis cultivation, sign language development, education, and real opportunities. 🌿 Even in crisis, her work reminds us what community, determination, and care for the land truly look like. 💪 Proof that when things fall apart, good people still come together. 🐝

No dog deserves to sit in a shelter confused and alone because they slipped out of their collar on their own property. Lucy deserves to go home and spend her days surrounded by love, not behind bars. #SaveLucy

#MemorialDay One of my favorite quotes: "If all else fails, I will retreat up the Valley of Virginia, plant my flag on the Blue Ridge, rally around the Scotch-Irish of that region, and make my last stand for liberty amongst a people who will never submit to tyranny whilst there is a man left to draw a trigger." General George Washington at Valley Forge 1777;

The Submarine Force had the highest casualty rate of all American forces in WW2. One in 5 submariners gave their lives; 52 boats and 3,506 men remain on eternal patrol. Subs made up less than 2% of the US Navy but sank nearly 60% of all Japanese shipping. #MemorialDay