Why does the CIA still exist?

On a regular basis, politicians of all stripes will bloviate about the need to trim the federal budget, eliminate waste, and generally have government do a better job for the taxpayers. Well, here's a suggestion, something that would plug a giant black hole that's sucking dollars into some bizarre netherworld, the government should get rid of the Central Intelligence Agency. It was created following World War II in response to the Cold War. Communism with a Capital C posed such an existential threat that various policy-makers decided it would be a good idea for the U.S. to have a permanent intelligence service that functioned independently of every other agency.

From what I can tell, those people, from President Truman on down the government chain of command, were pretty much totally wrong. Based on everything I've seen and read about the CIA's performance over the past 7 decades, everything they touch turns to crap. They work really, really hard and still manage to be dead wrong over and over and over. Either that, on those rare occasions when they've got it right and they really do know what's going on, they don't bother to tell anyone what they know.

I know. I know. I've ranted on this subject before. So what inspired this latest rant? I just finished reading The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. By the time I was done with it, I was starting to feel like strapping on a C-4 vest myself and heading for Langley wouldn't be a bad idea. There's nothing quite like learning that the guys in the CIA thought it was more important to keep hoarding data than it was to bother telling anyone in the FBI's counter-terrorism unit that several known terrorists were in the U.S. and taking flying lessons. The fact that Al Qaeda and other groups had been talking for many years about (a) taking a second shot at the World Trade Center and (b) flying airplanes into buildings was apparently irrelevant. After all, alerting the FBI would have let Al Qaeda know that U.S. intelligence was tracking them. Words fail me. I'd love to know what the point of gathering intelligence is if you don't plan to ever use it. If you're not going to use it, then that intelligence gathering is as pointless as hoarding used matchbooks or Hummel figurines.

Bottom line. The Central Intelligence Agency knew what Al Qaeda was up to, they knew it was just a matter of time, and they did absolutely nothing to prevent it. Tell them to go into another country and figure out a way to overthrow its government and they're right there, setting up coups and doing the happy dance. Suggest to them that maybe they do something proactive to help their own country and what's the response? A stone wall, silence, and active efforts to prevent U.S. law enforcement from finding out just what the CIA does know. I'd suggest that the next time around the terrorists go after CIA headquarters, but why would they? Based on all the evidence, the one building in the country that's never going to be a terrorist target is that structure in Langley, Virginia.

National Security Agency buildings and operatives should be pretty safe, too. They're another agency that has a pack rat mentality: they also hoard data apparently solely for the sake of hoarding data. Neither agency is much of a threat to any potential terrorists; CIA and NSA are voyeurs, not actors. They like to watch, but they're never going to do anything useful. If they do act, they'll manage to get it wrong or create a situation that leads to major headaches down the road -- the CIA isn't real good at thinking about long term consequences. If they were, they'd never have cooperated with the Pakistani intelligence service in supporting the taliban.

Of course, when it comes to anti-terrorism efforts and our bungling government, the CIA isn't exactly alone in its stupidity. One of the more depressing sections of the book describes the FBI's attempts to investigate the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen. The American ambassador to Yemen apparently created more problems for the investigative team than any of the Yemeni officials did. According to multiple sources, Barbara Bodine was more concerned with preserving the illusion of good relations with the Yemeni government than she was in helping find out exactly who was responsible for the deaths of American sailors. When the FBI's lead investigator returned to New York, Bodine refused to allow him to re-enter the country, which effectively knee-capped the investigation. At the time (and continuing to this day, for that matter) Yemen was teeming with operatives and cells of various jihadist groups, a fact that was well-known in the intelligence community but Bodine apparently preferred to ignore. In a just world, Bodine would now be rotting in some obscure hellhole, demoted to file clerk status or teaching at a cash-strapped community college, but no such luck -- she's a regular lecturer at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Political and International Affairs.

I say "illusion of good relations" because another thing that's become abundantly clear through the various books I've read on the subject is that the U.S. in general can be truly stupid in figuring out what's going on in the minds of our "allies." Maybe it's an American fault, but over and over we get lied to, sometimes in truly outrageous no-one-in-their-right-mind-would-believe-this-crap fashion, but the politicians keep right on taking people solely at face value. The Saudis repeatedly told the Americans, yes, we'll help you get Osama while at the same time they were steering money into the terrorists' treasuries. Al Qaeda would never have succeeded without the active, albeit covert, support of multiple Arab governments. Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Libya, Egypt. . . none of them worried about Al Qaeda and similar groups as long as those groups stayed in Afghanistan.

I'm not quite sure just what the takeaway is for me from this latest excursion into the incompetent cesspool that is American government. I already knew bureaucracies tend to be incredibly inefficient, and the more money that gets poured into them without any accountability, the more inefficient and incompetent they become. The CIA is a black hole: what are they spending money on? Who knows -- it's all classified, but Charlie Wilson's War with its descriptions of million dollar payrolls for Afghan warlords did a nice job of illustrating how easy it is for them to waste money. Further, all bureaucracies tend to end up focusing more on preserving their personal turf than on the reason they were created in the first place. And of course I knew that there are always desk monkeys who over-interpret the rules and create roadblocks where none should exist. You run into those people everywhere, from the power-tripping jerk at the DMV who doesn't want to accept your out of state birth certificate as legitimate because it's not exactly the same format as the one his state uses to the Human Resources clerks who insist on remarkably narrow definitions for job qualifications. I guess I just hadn't realized just how bad it was in the parts of the government we all hope are actually trying to help us, and for sure you don't expect to see pretty vindictiveness and personal power tripping on the ambassadorial level.

It is definitely time for me to stop reading recent American history -- I need to immerse myself in some upbeat, cheery fiction for awhile, something that will look good compared to the morass that is the current "war on terror." It's definitely time to re-read Game of Thrones. 

Thinking about guns

but am too depressed to string together anything coherent.

One man's weed

I spent yesterday trolling for wood ticks. Okay, I wasn't deliberately trolling for them, but I might as well have been. I was crawling around in the grass trying to take pictures of violets. At this time of the year we're blessed with a plethora of violets. Little tiny white violets, several different sizes of purple violets, and yellow violets. I wasn't particularly successful -- the camera kept wanting to focus on blades of grass instead of the flowers -- but it wasn't a bad way to spend a sunny afternoon.

The yellow violets are in the old orchard. The purple violets (the violet violets?) are scattered around the property, and I tend to see the tiny white ones close to the house.

When it comes to wildflowers, the violets are among my favorites. They bloom in the spring, they're a sure sign that winter is over, and in general they're a pretty inoffensive flower. I have a hunch the S.O. may like violets, too. As long as they're blooming, he knows he's not allowed to mow. 

Which brings me to my question of the day: Why on earth are violets included on the list of noxious weeds that Round-up will kill? What type of sick fuck soulless jerk would consider violets a problem?

Probably the same type of person who would consider the dandelions a problem. Personally, I like dandelions. They're cheerful, they're another sign Winter is definitely over, the young leaves make good salad greens, and I've heard the flowers can be made into an interesting wine. I've never tried it, but one of these years I may take a shot at it. 

As for the trolling for ticks, I wasn't particularly successful. I did find a dog tick on my foot yesterday, but it was many hours after crawling through the violets so doubt that's where I picked it up. 

Broken vows

Over the years I've made a number of promises to myself, usually about reading choices. Authors who insist on writing in dialect generally annoy the heck out of me, so I keep saying I won't read books that contain a lot of dialect or attempts at mimicking a regional accent. Authors who turn pets into characters or (even worse) have the pets serve as narrators also annoy me. I've spent many years avoiding books where you get to see what the cat or the dog or some other critter is thinking. The whole concept of seeing anything through the dog's eyes struck me as being way too twee for my taste.

As for dialect, in my many years of reading, I can think of exactly one book where the author did such a smooth job with writing dialect that it felt natural rather than affected -- Scarlet Sister Mary by Julia Peterkin. In every other example I can recall, attempts at the local dialect come across as stilted, unbelievable, condescending, distracting, or all of the above. Thus, one of my other promises to myself as a reader is that once I've seen that an author has a weakness for writing in dialect I'll avoid that author's work in the future.

In the past two weeks I managed to break both of those promises to myself. First, I made the mistake of reading a second Joseph Heywood book: Running Dark. My only excuse is that I knew Heywood sets his mysteries in the Upper Peninsula (his protagonist, Grady Service, is a Department of Natural Resources conservation officer). I had read one book in the series already (Blue Wolf in Green Fire) so decided to try another to see if it was any better. It's pretty common for the first few books by an author to be a tad awkward, but then the writer improves with time (or acquires a better copy editor). Heywood did not improve. If anything, the amount of what Heywood apparently thinks is Yooperese increased. Even worse, when Heywood starts salting in the Yooperese, it's generally to signal that the character speaking with a local accent is the Upper Michigan equivalent of a dumb yokel, a redneck, or a hick. Service himself supposedly grew up in the U.P. -- he's second generation DNR; his father was a game warden in the same district Service now covers -- so why doesn't Grady himself have a regional accent?

 In any case, there are other flaws in Heywood's books. Despite his claims of having spent a lot of time talking with conservation officers and doing research in the U.P., I kept getting the feeling that the research consisted of looking at a Rand McNally and reading state park brochures. It's like the fact the U.P. is huge just doesn't register with Heywood. He has Grady living near Bark River but dropping in to the DNR office in Newberry for morning coffee and makes it sound like the two towns are a few minutes apart when they're actually separated by about 125 miles. A run up to Marquette wouldn't be quite as bad (it's only about 80 miles) but it's still not right next door. I know cops can get places faster than we mere mortals who lack sirens and flashing red and blue lights on our cars, but so far as I know even cops can't teleport.

Okay, having screwed up by selecting a book to read that I knew in advance was likely to feature an annoying amount of dialect, what did I do?

I checked out a book -- Dog On It -- that warned me up front it was going to look at the world through a dog's eyes. Why? I don't know. Maybe because it was a dog and not a cat. There are a lot of mystery writers out there who love using cats as plot devices but not many that use dogs. I was curious.

The good news? The author, Spencer Quinn, can actually write. It made the annoyance of seeing everything through the dog's eyes a little less annoying. The book was remarkably readable. Will I read any other books in what appears to be a series (all narrated by the dog)? No. Because they're narrated by the dog.

If there's a Hell, I hope the Dulles brothers are in it

I just finished reading yet another depressing book about American foreign policy stupidity. This particular narrative describes the first (but definitely not the last) attempt by Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles to mold the world to fit their ethnocentric and elitist view of the way things should be. The great colonial powers -- Britain and France -- were losing their grip on the regions they once controlled so the Dulles siblings decided it was appropriate that the United States "take up the white man's burden," all in the name of fighting Communism.

Every so often when discussions of Iran's relationship with the United States come up, there'll be a reference to U.S. interference in Iranian politics in the 1950s. The fact the CIA engineered the overthrow of a popularly elected Prime Minister and helped strengthen an autocratic monarchy will get mentioned, but often the details are vague or the rationale obscure, e.g., "Iran was going to raise oil prices." That always had me wondering why we'd bother to overthrow a government over oil in the 1950s when we weren't as dependent on foreign oil then as we would be a few years later -- and so far as I know we didn't try to overthrow any governments  in the 1970s when OPEC jacked up oil prices. Now I know the real story -- it wasn't oil that the U.S. worried about; it was Stalin.

All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror by journalist Stephen Kinzer lays it all out: Iranian history beginning with the rise of the Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great, the importance of Shi'a branch of Islam, the role of the British in the Middle East, and the decision by the Dulles brothers to get the U.S. involved in suppressing nationalism and thus sow the seeds for generations of terrorism to follow. The years following World War II were troublesome ones for the European countries that had established colonies and "protectorates" around the world; more and more colonies decided they preferred governing themselves instead of putting up with exploitation by the British, French, Dutch, and other Europeans. Iran was never an actual colony, but generations of a corrupt monarchy had acquiesced in selling off the nation's resources to foreign interests. In the early 1900s, a British company obtained a concession giving that company exclusive rights to oil exploration and development in a region in southern Iran. On May 26, 1908, they struck liquid gold in what Kinzer describes as the greatest oil field ever found. Later that year, a group of investors formed the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. Within a few years, they had drilled hundreds of wells, laid many miles of pipeline, and built what was for many years the world's largest oil refinery on the island of Abadan in the Persian Gulf.

Under the terms of the concession, the British had complete control of Anglo-Persian. The Iranian government received royalties every year, but no Iranians were involved in managing the company or even working at professional positions such as engineer. The only Iranians employed were persons working at the lowest level jobs (i.e., manual laborers), those Iranians were paid subsistence wages, and the only housing available was a slum with no sewers, running water, or paved streets. In contrast, the British workers lived in a company town that was what Kinzer calls a "typical colonial enclave." These were conditions that anyone with more than two brain cells to rub together would recognize as a status that could not continue indefinitely, but the British chose to remain willfully ignorant.

It was not until after World War II, though, that Iranian unhappiness about the oil concession finally reached the point of no return. Over time, Iranians had become more and more unhappy about the many ways the British were screwing the country over: among other things, the oil company management refused to allow any representatives of the Iranian government to audit the books so there was a strong suspicion that the amount being paid in royalties was much smaller than the actual amount owed. The situation got worse when U.S. oil companies negotiated a deal with Saudi Arabia to form the Arab-American Oil Company and agreed to a 50/50 split on the oil revenues. The British flat out refused to agree to such an arrangement. In fact, according to Kinzer, no matter what proposal the Iranians put on the table, the British simply responded with a flat no. As far as the Brits were concerned, there was no negotiating points. From their perspective, everything was fine and they didn't intend to change a thing.

Then the Iranians elected Mohammad Mosaddegh as prime minister. Mosaddegh decided Iran had been getting cheated by the British long enough; he gave them an ultimatum: negotiate or Iran will nationalize its oil. Once again, the Brits said no, apparently assuming that Mosaddegh was bluffing. He wasn't.

Even before Mosaddegh followed through on the threat to nationalize Iran's oil, the British had begun plotting to overthrow the Iranian government. They had a well-established network of spies and covert operators in Iran; the British Secret Service had no qualms about sabotaging a democratically elected government if that government was threatening Britain's interests. Unlike the Americans who would take over the plotting when the British were expelled from the country, the British were motivated almost solely by greed. British investors didn't want to lose any of the money they'd been getting from the Anglo-Persian Oil company. While the Americans fretted about Communism creeping over the border into Iran from the Soviet Union, the British knew it was an unlikely prospect. Their decades of experience in the country meant they actually had a pretty good idea of what was a real threat and what wasn't. In 1952, as far as the British government was concerned, the real threat was financial and not ideological.

At the same time, the British knew that the U.S. would never agree to help with the Iranian problem if they realized the real issue was monetary rather than ideological. So they started pushing the threat of a Communist incursion, doing their best to make it sound like Mossaddegh and his political allies were one step away from inviting Stalin in to replace the Shah. That ploy didn't work on the Truman administration, but as soon as Truman was gone and Dwight Eisenhower was in the White House, things changed. British officials had begun talking with John Foster Dulles and Allan Dulles as soon as Eisenhower was elected. Both men were obsessed with combating the threat of Communism to the point of being unable to accept any other explanation for world events. Rather than seeing the rise of nationalism in former colonies as the natural desire of exploited peoples to be able to govern themselves, they were convinced every revolution was begun by agents funded by Moscow.

In December 1952 Winston Churchill himself insisted to Eisenhower that Mossaddegh had strong Communist leanings, a line Eisenhower apparently swallowed. Mossadegh, in fact, was strongly anti-Communist and was disdainful of even moderate socialism. In March 1953 John Foster Dulles, who was serving as Secretary of State for Eisenhower, directed the CIA (headed by his brother Allan Dulles) to spent $1 million to stage a coup to overthrow Mosaddegh. Kermit Roosevelt (grandson of Theodore Roosevelt) was sent to Iran to manage events in person. By the end of August, the CIA's coup d' etat had succeeded, the Shah was firmly on the Peacock Throne, Mosaddegh was in prison, and the British were back in charge of the oil. 

Having placed the Shah firmly back on the throne, the U.S. began funneling massive amounts of foreign aid to Iran to keep the Shah in power. As we all know now, the Shah become increasingly autocratic, the Iranian secret police terrorized the population, and opposition to the Shah and hatred of the U.S. government (the Great Satan) grew exponentially. Following the Islamic Revolution, the U.S. managed to cement its image as the Great Satan even more by welcoming the exiled Shah with open arms. It's no surprise that the Iranian government under the ayatollahs provided funding and guidance to various Islamic radical terrorist groups, such as Hamas. We're still paying today for the arrogance of the Dulles brothers and the British. They gave a good-sized chunk of the world valid reasons to hate us.

As for the Dulles brothers, having succeeded in overthrowing one government, they apparently decided that it would be fun to do it again. The CIA's second coup was in Guatemala, where once again the U.S. helped topple a democratically elected government in order to install a dictatorship. Hundreds of thousands of people died, and the country is still recovering from decades of civil war and unrest. Their obsession with Communism is why we wound up in Vietnam, and it also gave us the Bay of Pigs. They set a pattern for the CIA that probably continues to this day. They may not have been as openly evil as Hitler or Stalin, but they set in motion events that over time may have killed just as many people. The more I learn about the Dulles brothers, the more I find myself hoping that there really is a Hell. If there was ever anyone who deserved to be roasted over a slow fire, they qualify.

Feeling the urge to get creative in the garden

It's May, the snow is gone, the hummingbirds are back, and once again I'm indulging in the Water Feature Fantasy. Back when I first discovered BBC America, that channel carried a lot of shows that were popular in Great Britain: "Cash in the Attic," "Changing Rooms," "Ground Force," and a number of others with names I've forgotten. I loved "Ground Force." The team would go in to someone's minuscule back yard, which is always referred to as a "garden" in Britain, even when it's a patch of bare dirt with not even a weed to be seen, and turn it into something lovely in what seemed like record time and without huge expenditures of money. Every so often they'd incorporate a water feature.

Not quite what I've got in mind, but close. 

Well, "Ground Force" is long gone -- the BBC cancelled the series almost ten years ago -- but the memories of the water features linger on. The fantasy went dormant during the Omaha and Atlanta years, but it's back now. Our yard slopes, which makes a water feature a little easier to design. I had been thinking about various possibilities, but then this weekend I spotted something that might be the perfect vessel: an old cast iron sink that we used back in the '70s as a feed trough in the pig pen. The pen is long gone, and I thought the sink was too -- a lot of the old iron that had built up through 90 years of frugal Finlanders never throwing anything away did get picked up and sold as scrap metal a few years ago. I was a little surprised that sink got missed, but it was. And now the Water Feature Fantasy is back. An old kitchen sink, a broken pitcher pump, . . . the possibilities are definitely there. Now all I have to do is find the ambition to follow through on them.

It finally melted

Here's the proof. A month ago that old wheelbarrow in the background was still buried in snow. 

Daffodils developed by a plant breeder who was an idiot. The flowers are so heavy the stems can't support them. Two drops of dew and they topple. They looked good in the catalog, though, and do make nice cut flowers. 

A patch of bloodroot on the edge of the yard. There was so much bloodroot blooming on the hillside that for a few days it looked like it had snowed again. The hill was almost solid white.

We've been enjoying our very brief Spring, which appears to have slid straight into summer. We went from below freezing and snowing on May 15 to temps in the 80s ten days later. Which was good, because we had family visit and high temperatures meant we didn't have to worry about heat for either the guest cabin or the motorhome. We put the grandkids to work, of course. The younger ones got to stack wood; the oldest was up on the barn roof.  

Every time we do any work on that barn and I notice the construction details, I'm  amazed it's still standing. We're going to put a metal roof on it this time; the last four roofs were rolled roofing and they only lasted about 20 years. If we do metal, we'll be dead long before the roof needs work again.

Pulitzer Project: Guard of Honor

Guard of Honor won the Pulitzer for Fiction in 1949. When I saw it on the list, the author, James Gould Cozzens, was another writer who fell into the "I'd never heard of him before" category. Cozzens, at least according to Wikipedia, was a successful writer but had a privacy fetish that rivaled J. D. Salinger's. He eschewed publicity tours and speaking engagements; he felt his work should stand or fall on its own merits. Whether or not he would have been quite so anti-publicity if his books hadn't sold well is, of course, debatable. It's easy to have a privacy fetish when you're doing well without having to do book tours; it's a lot harder when the alternative to hawking the book is seeing it on remainder tables.

In any case, Cozzens could write. Guard of Honor is complex and multi-layered;  it is not an easy read although it is an engaging one. The action in the novel takes place over the course of three days at an Army Air Force base in Florida during World War II. The situation mirrors Cozzens' own war experience: he began by writing training manuals and eventually became a press officer. That is, he handled public relations and tried to minimize any potential bad news while playing up the good, and he did so in a position that gave him unparalleled access to what was happening with the Army Air Force. Cozzens was assigned to the staff of General "Hap" Arnold. One of the characters in the novel is a fairly close fit for Cozzens' own life: Captain Hicks has been writing training manuals but is pushing a project that falls more under the rubric of public relations.

The Wikipedia biography of Cozzens notes that he was viewed as too conservative, but I'm not sure how anyone would reach that conclusion from reading this novel. Perhaps it's apparent in his other works, but in Guard of Honor it would be hard to determine just what the author's personal biases were. Two issues that were hot topics at the time were the role of women in the military and the role of African-Americans. Both issues are themes in Guard of Honor. There's a Women's Army Corps detachment at the air base; the controllers in the tower are WACs and they're serving in other positions as well. In some scenes, the WACs are portrayed in a less than flattering light while in others the author is sympathetic to the problems they face. Similarly with the black troops, at times Cozzens allows the characters who oppose integrating the service to express their reservations but in other scenes he lays out the case for integration. One of the least likable characters in the book is a hot-headed smug Northern liberal, but he's balanced out by an equally obnoxious bigoted Southerner. If Cozzens can be labeled as a conservative, it's more likely because of his presenting various characters with moral or ethical dilemmas; he seems to prefer the characters who stick to their principles instead of opting to bend the rules in order to cover someone's ass or who claim the ends justify the means.

One thing that struck me while reading this book was that it reminded me a lot of Catch-22. Of course, Cozzens and Joseph Heller had the shared experience of having served in the Army Air Force so it's not surprising they would have formed similar opinions of the military bureaucracy.

Would I recommend this book to other readers? Yes, with a caveat. Guard of Honor is not an easy read. The structure is complicated. The reader sees events from multiple perspectives and numerous flashbacks as different characters reminisce about how they got to where they are now. This isn't a book a person can skim while sitting in a beach chair. I think it was worth the effort, but other readers may not.

Next up on the list: The Way West by A. B. Guthrie. Once again, it's a book and an author I don't recall ever hearing about before I started this project.

We drove right past Spring into Summer

And now we're back to Almost Winter -- the forecast when we returned was "snow with possible rain mixed in." Note that it's not rain mixed with snow; it's snow mixed with rain. And it was May 14.

On the other hand, one of the first things we did when we got home was fill the hummingbird feeder and, snow in the forecast or not, we do have hummers flitting around the yard. So maybe it really is Spring, or what passes for Spring, here in the U.P.

We spent not quite two weeks imposing on the Younger Daughter in Missouri. We did some appropriately touristy things -- wandered around the historic town of Ste. Genevieve, went to an Azalea Festival that had no azaleas, checked out the ruins of the Einstein Silver Mine near the Silver Mines campground on the Mark Twain National Forest -- but mostly we just basked in the weather. When we left the U.P., temps were just barely above freezing. It was in the 80s in Missouri. As the S.O. put it, we went looking for Spring and drove right past it into Summer. It was wonderful. High water pants, sandals, the risk of sunburn . . .

The Einstein Mine site was interesting. It's one of those places that looks like it's been untouched by the hand of man until you start looking a little more closely. . . and then you realize that what looks like a natural rock formation is actually cut stone or the remnants of poured concrete. I looked up the Einstein Mine; it was a fairly large industrial complex, although you'd never know it from just looking at the ruins.

Einstein Silver Mine site, May 2014

I went looking for historic images on-line. This was the only one I could find:

It's probably circa 1900 or a little earlier. 

The mining complex also includes a dam: 

For a sense of scale, embiggen the photo. There are people on the rocks on the other side of the St. Francis River. We arrived at the mine site just in time to witness a rescue by local emergency personnel of a person who had apparently fallen while scrambling down those rocks to get closer to the dam or the river. There was a group of high school age boys camping; one of those kids probably over-estimated his ability to scramble down some fairly steep rock slopes. 

We checked out some other campgrounds while we were in the area, including Hawn State Park. The next time we visit the Younger Daughter we plan to use the RV. If we're at a campground, she won't feel obligated to feed and entertain us. Even better, we won't be stuck sleeping on an air mattress that's seen better days. 

On the road again

Iris in full bloom in a garden in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri 

After staring at the snow melting ever so slowly, the S.O. and I decided that maybe it was like that old saying about a watched pot never boiling. You know, as long as we were watching it, the snow wasn't going to leave. So we hit the road for Missouri. We've been down here for about a week now, and it has been a pleasant break from the mud season. Up north I can't even tell where the flowerbeds are; down here lilacs, bearded iris, peonies, and a zillion other things are in full bloom. We've done a little bit of playing tourist, a little bit of shopping, and checked out several of the campgrounds that are close to where the Younger Daughter lives. It's been nice. We wandered around historic Ste. Genevieve one day and checked out the ruins of the Einstein Mine on the Mark Twain National Forest. We even managed to stumble across an event the S.O. could get enthusiastic about: the 47th Annual Azalea Festival in Fredricktown.

The Azalea Festival was interesting. It had a lot of things going on -- a carnival (complete with a tilt-and-hurl), an arts and crafts fair, a children's pet show with the pets all dressed up in various costumes. I wasn't sure if it was possible for a dog to look truly embarrassed until I saw a vizsla dressed in a hot pink tutu with matching hot pink nail polish on its toes. The one thing the Azalea Festival did not have was azaleas -- the crafts fair was set up in "Azalea Park," which was basically just a big flat green open space down the hill from the courthouse square. No azaleas, at least none that I could see.

Up the hill from the carnival, the arts and crafts, and the dogs dressed in strange costumes was the one event that interested the S.O. It was a pretty decent car show with a wide variety of entries, although based on the photos he took, I think he was most interested in the classic hot rods.

 Monday we'll be heading home to the tundra. If we're lucky, the worst of the Mud Season will be over.