Come Sail Away @come--sailaway - Tumblr Blog

Here are the lighthouses of Europe. The map is even better than it might seem at first glance: the colors are the real colors, the patterns are the real patterns, and the size of the dots is the distance at which each light is visible.

Interactive map: https://geodienst.github.io/lighthousemap/

by @emollick

angryschnauzer

@nuggsmum

nuggsmum

Oooo!

just-shower-thoughts

Blind people must save a lot on electricity.

cynopansy

They do actually!

mauve-moth

I had a blind professor, last semester, and I swung through his office to make up an exam. It was a while before I knew he was in there because he was sitting with the lights off. I finally went in, apologized, and took the exam by the light of a nearby window (which was fine). Forty-five minutes into dead silence he panicked and yelled in this booming voiced, “WAIT, YOU CAN SEE!!!” before diving across his desk to turn on the lights. I’m sure he was embarrassed but I thought it was endearing and it highlighted a large aspect of disabled life that I hadn’t previously considered.

hotmolasses

Sort of relatedly I once had professor who was deaf, but she had learned to read lips and speak so she could communicate easily with hearing people who didn’t know sign language. One day she had gotten off topic and was talking a little about her personal life, so that one of the students said “Oh, I know, I grew up in Brooklyn too.”

She stared at him for a long time and then said “How do you know I’m from Brooklyn?”

And he said “You have a Brooklyn accent.”

She said “I do?” and the whole class nodded, and then she burst out laughing and said “I had no idea! The school where I learned to speak was in Brooklyn. I learned by moving my mouth and tongue the way my teachers did. So I guess it makes sense that I have their accent, I just never thought about it.”

nharuya-deactivated20190108

These are cool things to maybe consider when writing a character with these disabilities!!

landscape-lunacy

Lake District, England - by Matt Oliver

landscape-lunacy

Ambleside, England - by GM-FOTS

archae-heart-deactivated2021012

fog in the Faroes

chewbacca

Sanditon (2019) dir. Lisa Clarke

oamul

prettybooks

One of the best things about the Christmas break is having plenty of time to read. I’ve picked five books that I definitely want to read next – three festive reads and two highly-anticipated books of 2020. Read the post over on prettybooks.co.uk.

bai-xue-lives

So I just now learned about Stagecoach Mary and how have I never heard of this absolute LEGEND of a woman before

She was born a slave and freed when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued (she was about 30)

She was about six feet tall and 200 pounds and once she was free she decided she’d never take shit from anyone ever again

When one of her close friends, a nun by the name of Mother Amadeus, became ill with pneumonia at her convent in Montana, Mary headed alone into the frontier to nurse Mother Amadeus back to health

After Mother Amadeus recovered, she gave Mary a job as the foreman of the convent. She repaired buildings, took care of chickens, made the long and dangerous journeys into town for supplies, and did other odd jobs.

She could drink most men under the table, and one saloon offered five bucks and a free shot of whiskey to any man who could take a punch to the face from Mary and remain standing.

She was once said by a local paper to have broken more noses than anyone else in Montana

She was outspokenly Republican, which at this time was the liberal party in America, and would get into political debates with the more conservative townsfolk

One time a man insulted her outside the saloon so hit him in the face with a rock, and only stopped when other cowboys held her back.

On one supply run into town, her wagon overturned and the horses fled. Mary spent all night single-handedly fending off a pack of wolves with her guns before she righted the heavy wagon by herself and tracked down the spooked horses. The only thing lost in the accident was a jar of molasses.

She lost her job at the convent when she got into a gunfight with a male employee who did not want to take orders from a black woman. She reportedly shot him in the ass, which angered the local bishop.

After losing her convent job, Mary spent a brief time running a restaurant, where she welcomed and served all comers

When a job for a mail carrier opened at the local US Post Office, Mary got the job because she managed to hitch six horses to a wagon faster than any of the male candidates

She was sixty at the time

This made her the first black woman mail carrier, and the second woman mail carrier in US history

When the snows were too deep for the horses to manage the long and dangerous delivery routes, Mary would strap on snowshoes, put the bags of mail on her shoulders, and do it herself

At one point she apparently had a pet eagle????

She only retired from the mail route when she was about 70 years old, and instead made a quieter living by babysitting and running a laundry business in the town of Cascade

She was a huge baseball fan and often gave the local team a big bouquet of flowers from her garden

The people of Cascade loved Mary so much that they closed the schools annually on her birthday

When a law was passed in Montana that forbade women from drinking in saloons, the mayor of Cascade granted Mary an exemption.

When her house burned down, the whole town got together to help her build a new one

She continued drinking, fighting, and going to baseball games until she died of liver failure at 82 in 1914