Iowa

My wife and I went to Iowa last week to see her mom Kathy. This is Kathy:




Kathy's been really sick, and things haven't been so great for her lately. But despite her troubles, only a few minutes with Kathy made me recall, once again, where my wife's enormous capacity for love comes from. She's a wonderful lady.

And anyone who so generously tolerates my incessant shutter-clicking deserves only the best:




She's got such a beautiful face; I could take pictures of her all day:




Kathy lives just outside of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I guess you can call the area "suburban," except that there's not really any urban to be "sub-" to, and except it's really so close to rural stuff that it's more like "ex-"urban. Here, for example, is a view, looking outside past the smoking area of the place where she lives:




As you can see, it's corn fields and farms just past the perimeter.

A few more from Iowa. Stephen Colbert would like this one -- but why is the gigantic inflatable Patriotic American Eagle shilling for Volvo?



Apparently, the locals don't think there's anything funny about "Kum & Go":




Finally, here's a great sign from a local park. You can sort of make out the strip-mall land way in the background, but the park itself has lots of green fields and a nice pond full of colorful ducks:




I love that whoever came up with this sign made sure to say BOTH that there's no "swimming" as well as no "wading" -- we wouldn't want some smartass scofflaw to take advantage of the ambiguity of the word "swimming" to go wading in this pond!

Even better, the sign says BOTH that there's no "fishing" as well as no "seining". Not being a sportman, I didn't know what seining was until I looked it up -- Wikipedia tells me that it's a type of fishing involving the use of a seine, which is a "fishing net that hangs vertically in the water by attaching weights along the bottom edge and floats along the top."

Kudos to whoever drafted this sign. Once more, the scofflaw seiner, hoping to take advantage of the ambiguity of the term "fishing," will be thwarted.

They sure are good at closing loopholes in Iowa. No wonder it goes first in the presidential selection process.