A little blue flower is a terrible thing to waste

With the completion of a new bridge on Highway 10, my second base route to work is again open. This is the road that connects Richmond with Excelsior Springs, aka 'Selser. I went to check on how the bridge was coming along yesterday, and -- despite a state Web site saying it was closed -- found the orange cones off to the side and the bridge open to traffic. This is good news because I'm prone to boredom and, despite my best back-road experimentation, I'd gotten a little tired of the Highway 210 commute. To reach the bridge site, I took Route EE, a beautiful, curvy route through the foothills to the Ray County Ozarks (see the photo below). The photo answers a question from a friend back in Massachusetts: Is everything there flat? No, we've got some beautiful hilly terrain to go along with our equally breathtaking (at least to me) river-bottom flat land. At the crest of the hill, I stopped for photos and found these blue flowers. Most were past their peak, but there were still some unopened buds waiting on a few more warm days. If you know the name of this wildflower, let me know. I did take the liberty of naming the growth below "Thistleflitter and Poppycock," which sounds like either a Joe Cocker album title or a pub in north London. My Treybooshkins, the Poppycock may also refer to my total lack of botanical knowledge.