It Gets Better in Hutch

The highest point in Hutchinson

The state fair has dominated the past 12 days of my life.

Yoder Heritage Day

I spent the day at the Yoder Heritage Festival in Yoder, KS this past Saturday. Yoder is a community with a large population of Amish and on the last Saturday in August everyone in town gets together and participates in traditional area activities, like buggy races, tractor pulls, horseback football and a big old parade. There's also some amazing homemade food (pie and ice cream!) and traditional music and 'cowboy poetry.'
I was intially concerned about getting names of people whose photos I shot, as Amish are traditionally reluctant to have their photos taken and I know that sometimes they decline to give their names (making them sometimes unpublishable in the newspaper as a result) but I either got lucky or was worried for nothing, as everyone I spoke with was very accomodating. A good day all around.

Boy Scouts!

Spent a summer evening with the Boy Scouts in Nickerson, where members of the local troops gathered up flags for retirement. While any private citizen can retire a flag, it is commonly done by Scout troops and veteran's associations, who have their own ceremony procedures. The most common way to retire a flag is through burning, as recommended in the U.S. Flag Code.
Never having been to a retirement ceremony before, it was pretty neat to watch and these scouts definitely took their duties seriously.