One of the great things about County Kerry in Ireland is that it makes photography easy. Maybe too easy. Basically, you just pull off the road every once in a while, point your camera in a random direction, and take some pictures. They’ll all be great.

But let’s start out with something simple. This perfect rainbow greeted us on our first day here. And there was no price to pay, either. The weather was great, with just an occasional light sprinkle. That was enough.

By the way, you have Marian to thank for this. I didn’t even notice the rainbow because I was too busy trying to keep the car in one piece. I’m a bit of a leadfoot driver, but the speed limits here are pretty unbelievable. Even on small, twisty roads, the posted speed limit is 60 mph, and I rarely feel safe above 30-40 mph. But the Irish drivers hurtle along even though the lanes are only a few inches wider than the cars themselves and hairpin turns can appear out of nowhere at any time. On the bright side, we’re still alive and I’ve got loads of beautiful pictures.

For those of you keeping score at home, this picture was taken in the vicinity of Loher. Today we’re driving up to Portmagee to take a boat tour of the Skellig Islands. The weather is spectacular right now, clear and sunny and nicely cool, so it should be a nice trip. Puffin season is over, to my great sorrow, but I’m sure there will be plenty of other attractions.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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