i have a deck. vegetables are in. sunflowers to come (charlie…). next weekend, i’m hoping to relax. 
tonight i came back up to central via mankato, which means i dipped into west central mn before getting into true central mn. i headed up the minnesota river valley for bit and then hit lake country. i visited two biomes on my way up here. and vastly different parts of mn. 
for the record, there is something weirdly different about west central mn versus southeastern mn. i’m not sure what it is – perhaps the farms are farther apart and seem a little more industrial; maybe it makes no assumptions about what it could be, what it really isn’t (southeastern mn does that a little bit): it knows it’s farmland and it will always be prairie. it’s a little more desolate. a little more hick. a little less “our poo don’t stink.”
i need some blogging ideas. what do you all want to read about?
*the title needs a little explanation. remember that 90s song – “and i miss you; like the deserts miss the rain…and i miss you…. like the deserts miss the rain.” etc etc. it’s a song called “missing” by the band  everything but the girl. i actually didn’t know the name of the song until i just now looked it up, because my HS friends and i called the “the biome song.” weird? yes. we had just learned about biomes when the song came out, and my friend chandra said that since it mentioned deserts, it would be the biome song. 
and minnesota has four biomes in it – tallgrass aspen parkland, prairie, deciduous forest, and coniferous forest. i drove through two, as i mentioned above. this explanation took up more space than the blog post itself did. wow.