Going Up

Sited at the top of the ridge along West Wash, Capital West is taking a place of prominence on Madison's skyline.

I'm a sucker for construction sites, so I strolled up there to take a closer look at how construction has come along this week.

They've filled in that great big hole on the south side of the building with three levels of ... something. Underground parking? Retail space? Storage? I'd hate to live in an apartment down there, unless they're planning to level the hilltop to let a little more light in.

Exposed rebars at the Capital West construction site appear to roll like a surf. Almost seems a shame to cover them over with concrete.

Pavers

While taking some photos of houses in Madison, I looked down at the uneven ground I was tripping over and saw these bricks making up a back stoop. There was something written on the bricks underfoot, so I snapped this photo, pretty much as an afterthought, to look at later.

"Purington Block" the one on the left says, and "Marion Paver" on the right.

Google "Purington Block" and you'll find out more than you ever wanted to know about the history of Purington bricks, of Galesburg, Illinois. These guys made enough brick to pave streets from here to Panama City. Okay, not in a straight line, but they did pave streets here and in Panama City.

I remember walking up a Madison back alley that was still paved in bricks, but now I can't remember where it was.

Okay, random thought generator's gone into overdrive ... obviously time to stop.

This may be the weirdest pop machine in Madison. Naturally, it's on State Street. It's about the size of a filing cabinet. It's about the same color, too. I could've gotten a better picture of it if I'd felt safe getting closer, but this is obviously an extra-terrestrial device for stealing the life essence from earthlings, feebly disguised as a pop machine. A shot from the curb will have to do from this intrepid reporter.

Tree Hugger

Big Cheese

Coffee Cake

Early Bird

I was tempted to buy these, maybe for a fun lunch set, but I resolved never again to eat off plastic. Too bad.

Wondering Where The Lions Are

Man, he looks sad, doesn't he?

State Street Hodge Podge

Can you find yours truly? Look between Fontana's and the art museum.

Leafing Out

I love this first hint of spring, when the leaves unfurl.

When we moved into Our Humble O-Bode, the previous owner had stacked firewood alongside the deck in the back yard, where an opportunistic maple sapling had taken root. Over the summer it grew to be almost six feet tall.

There are precious few trees growing in our yard: A flowering crab, a few lilacs, a hawthorn. All decorative. No shade trees to speak of. The maple's base is practically under the deck. Its trunk grows up around the rail of the deck in a wicked dog-leg. I hate to discourage anything as determined as that.

I planned to dig it out and transplant it last fall, but getting under the deck to excavate a root ball turned out to be impossible, and I resigned myself to cutting it down. But not right away. In the spring, I told myself.

I couldn't cut it down this spring.

It's not bothering anybody. It's not undermining the foundations of the deck, or muscling aside the woodwork. When it does, I figure I can prune it back. If it ever overwhelms the deck or encroaches on the house, then I'll have to get out the axe, but it's not a problem now, and maybe in a year or two it'll be big enough to give us a little shade over the deck for a couple summers. So I let it grow.

A hardwood Daruma doll caught the evening light through the window of the front door.

First of all, how long have the 80's been "retro?" The 80's were just ... ah ... okay, they started twenty-seven years ago. But retro? Really? I mean, I know those eyes. That's Morten Harket looking up from a cartoon page in the video Take On Me by Norwegian boy band a-ha. I wasn't into them but I watched a lot of MTV and that one got a hell of a lot of air time.

Retro. Huh. Dammit. That's what happens when I'm not paying attention, I guess.

There's just too much violins on State Street these days ...

... Oh! Never mind

Handy

Scribed into the concrete on Carroll Street beside the Anchor bank parking lot.

I must have walked past these hands hundreds of times and never saw them before because the sun has to hit the pavement at just the right angle.

I think the Roman numerals are supposed to be the date: 9 - 29 - 8 1

I can't read the name below. Maybe "Nate?"

Knitty Gritty Mil-City?

It's some kind of knitted golden fabric, zip-tied to a ginko tree on MLK Boulevard. Does anybody know what this is about?

[ADDED 5-27-08: It turns out to be the calling card of whoever owns this MySpace Page. ]

From the corner of Broom and Main, the new Dane County Courthouse looks ... kinda scary. Almost like it's going to eat the houses across the street.

The skeletal remains of Sacred Heart Hospital as they sat baking in the August sun.

Developers picked it clean, intending to use the carcass as a frame on which to build another downtown condominium, but plans hit a bump and the design had to be jiggered a bit, so it sat like this for quite a few months.

There's a hole in front of it big enough hide a herd of elephants. It's a good thing we didn't get a lot of rain last fall.


Construction's coming right along now that they've got all the details ironed out.

If I've got my head around the concept, this is going to be the glass-faced tower of condos at 309 West Washington.

First the robins, then the kids

Robins aren't the most reliable measure of the coming of spring, you can take that as gold. I've seen robins scratching through six inches of snow, looking in vain for a stray bug or worm. They come back way too early.

But grade-school kids picnicking on the lawn of the capital — now, that's a sure-fire indication that spring has finally come. Gladdened the cockles of my heart to see them out there today.

The Vein in Dane

Some kind of creeper &mdash I'll have to check it again after it's leafed out to see if I can figure out what kind — has been encouraged to climb the spiral ramp to the parking lot at the Monona Terrace. With all its leaves temporarily shed, it looks like nothing so much as a network of veins or nerves stretching across the bare concrete. And made the foundations of the Terrace look creepily alive.

The Max Wahl apartment building is 75 years old this year. Old Max had a flair for a grand entrance, didn't he?

The cryptic notice "This Entrance" has been amended by some wag to read "This is France," which makes about as much sense as the original, now that I think about it.

After a magnificent dinner at Peppino's starting with crab cakes and ending in orange and pumpkin cake with coffee, I finally noticed the sprig of rosemary growing from a pot in the window. How did I miss that? As I got up from the table I pulled a single leaf and held it to my nose to savor the rich aroma. Wonderful.

Spring slattern of seasons
you have soggy legs
and a muddy petticoat
drowsy
is your hair your
eyes are sticky with
dream and you have a sloppy body from
being brought to bed of crocuses
when you sing in your whiskey voice
the grass rises on the head of the earth
and all the trees are put on edge

- e.e. cummings

On, Wisconsin! Come snow, or sleet, or gloom of winter storm ...

I'm sure by this time the whole 'snow in April' theme has been done to death by dozens of Wisconsin bloggers, but I took the pictures and I've been slogging through the stuff all day, so I'm going to post, dammit!

I'll do this guy next, just to get the statues out of the way.

I can never remember who this guy was, other than he died in the battle of Chickamunga, and he was Norwegian. My memory, scrabbling around for something to call him, comes up with Sven Chickamunga.

He's looked better.

The wind-driven snow flocked all the trees in capital square so they stood out from the background as if they were lit from within. This stand of trees along Pinckney were very nearly incandescent, even in the early morning gloom.

Some courageous soul dared to walk the narrow, snow-covered granite curb running the length of the sidewalk leading up to the capital and an hour of the day that I can hardly walk a straight line on level pavement. Bravo!

Grace Episcopal is a commanding presense on the square even on an overcast day, when it's cloaked in a muting blanket of snow.

Flocked bikes locked up to a rack at the top of State Street.

The top of State Street has always seemed like a cozy place to me, and especially so on this frozen morning when my destination is Michelangelo's coffee shop (the awning marked "coffe" to the right) for a piping hot beverage.

We're all hoping that, by this time tomorrow, the snow will be gone, and we can eat our acorns without having to dig through the white crap to find them.

Sneg.

That's the Russian word for "snow" and I like it a lot right now because it sounds sort of snot-like and messy.

I've of two minds on snow.

On the one hand, I like snow so much that I moved back here, the state where I grew up, because I missed the variations of the seasons, and snow was one of those variations. They have snow in other latitudes, but not like we have it here (except in northern Japan; they have a pretty darned good winter season there).

I love the silent snow fall at night, the thrilling mid-day flurry, the fearsome attack of a stinging gale-driven snow. I love the way wind makes it pillow up. I love heavy, wet snow that throws bare tree branches into sharp relief as it sticks to the wind-swept side.

When the temps stay well below zero, the snow remains a flowing, fluffy blanket, but after just a day of warmer temps, even in the lower thirties, it crusts over so that an adventuresome boy can walk across its frozen surface or, if the mood strikes, and it certainly will, he can stomp holes in it.

Just a foot of snow fall will lead adults to heap it up at the ends of driveways high enough for kids to dig labrynthine fortresses in it.

Snow's real purty, and it's lots of fun.

On the other hand ... this is freaking April! Enough already! I'm ready to stroll down the street in my shirt sleeves on my lunch break. No such luck today. One look at the slush-covered sidewalk and the runnels of melting snow in the streets and I went back to my cubicle to read.

Enough, thank you. Time for spring.

Oh, Ye Gods!

Look at the date. Look at the date! Does that say April? Of course it does! So what's with all this white crap?

The first guy who makes a "global warming" joke to me gets a roundhouse kick right in the nose.

Your car may be a piece of junk if:

- any part of it is held in place with bungee cords, baling wire, twine, duct tape, masking tape or any kind of tape

- any part of it is missing that would be obvious even to people who had never seen a car before

- it has been folded, spindled or mutilated (bonus points if the wheel scrapes against a bent fender)

The Modest Offices of WORT Radio are only four blocks from where I work, but either they transmit from another location or they broadcast at about 50 watts of power, because I've got to constantly fiddle with the tuner of my radio to pull in the station. After two o'clock on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday it's worth the trouble, though, because that's when they play plenty of hot jazz.

[Footnote: According to the station's website, they broadcast a 2,000-watt signal from a tower on the southwest side of town.]

Ranks of Lantern-like Lamps line the Facade of the Lorraine on West Washington Street


The Lorraine used to be one of the grand old hotels in downtown Madison, back when there were grand old hotels in Madison. If it were still a hotel, it would be called The Grande Olde Hotel and be crammed to the rafters with pretentious geegaws and foofery. Either that, or it would be the seediest rat trap in town.

But it's not. It's been refurbished as condos, and pretty nice ones, from what I can tell of the photos I've seen posted by bloggers who've been inside, and even a few who live there. Even from the outside, it looks like quite a beautiful old pile now. The copper patina on these lanterns and around the overhang add a venerably aged look to the front entrance.

If there's anything I don't like about The Lorraine, it's that the face of the building almost always seems to be in shade, but that's a very minor quibble.

Ice Out

Open water is slowly making a return to Monona Bay.

I had a little walk along North Shore Drive and took a detour through the park by the rowing club's boat house. The rip rap has soaked up enough warmth from the sun to force a retreat of the ice sheet.

The waterway under the trestle leading out to Monona Bay is entirely free of ice now. You could've walked under that trestle on a sheet of ice six inches thick a week and a half ago.

... and there's a little more open water on the other side of the trestle, but there's still quite a bit of ice out there.

A coworker said she saw a couple guys row out to the ice in a boat, then climb out onto the ice to fish.

Damn.

My Darling B shows the Timster how it was done in the early days of video games.

It doesn't get much easier to grasp than Pac-Man: One joystick, that's it. No jump button, no fire button, no other buttons at all after you punch "one player" or "two player."

He thrashed his mother. He couldn't beat his old man at Galaga, however.

The video games were part of an exhibit at the museam of the Wisconsin Historical Society on the western corner of capital square. It was a lot more popular than we though it'd be; we had to wait in line quite a while to play Galaga.

Spring!

Pretty close to spring, anyway.

True, it did snow -- just flurries -- during the dinner hour today, but for a while we had some pretty darned nice, I dare say even warm weather.

And yesterday we had sunshine and temps in the sixties! The snow's just about gone from every lawn and pavement.

As the warm temps hung in for the second day in a row, the water on Lake Mendota began to open up. Ducks enjoyed this pool along the shore near the campus and ... are those guys ice fishing in the distance?

I would've gone out there to see what they were catching, if it weren't for the fact that I didn't feel like going for a polar plunge today.

From what I heard, the ice was six to eight inches thick -- probably enough to safely support me, but from what I could see, it was also shot through with deep cracks and covered in water.

In the interest of staying dry, I stayed ashore.

No Diving

Look at all those damn rocks.

And shallow rocks, at that.

On the Ice I

The weather was so sunny and warm that I could hardly wait to peel out of my pyjamas and take a walk.

There's a park at the end of Frostwoods Avenue that fronts on Lake Monona. I could see a few people on the ice fishing.

I haven't been fishing in years, and the last time I was ice fishing I wasn't any taller than my dad's knees, but there's a weird, almost irresistable attraction to walking across a frozen lake. The thought crossed my mind a couple weeks ago, when the temps were below freezing and I felt confident that the ice was safe. With the sun beating down and a warm wind blowing today, I wasn't so confident, but if I went sploot through the ice, maybe one of the fishermen would see me disappear and call the EMTs.

So I took a little walk across Lake Monona ...

On the Ice II

Ice fishing on Lake Monona is not going to last many more days past this weekend as temps climb into the fifties and the insulating layer of snow melts off.

In my short thirty-minute walk across the ice, I watched fishermen scoot their shelters from hole to hole, leaving a trail of shavings behind them.

On the Ice III

Contrails accented the wide, blue sky over the bay as I headed back toward the south shore.

On the Ice IV

I came ashore in a park along the bicycle trail that runs from Bridge Road to John Nolan Drive, through a narrow sliver of the city of Monona that hugs the south shoreline of the lake. The ice there was thin, as I could see from a hole somebody had chopped in the ice about ten yards from shore (for a cold plunge?), but I took the chance anyway, following a pair of tracks somebody had made earlier in the morning, and didn't get wet.

It's brassy-looking, it's about the size of a quarter (shown below for comparison), and it's about the ugliest coin minted in my lifetime. A few of the state quarters have made my face wrinkle up, but they don't come close to this new dollar for sheer ghastliness. Washington looks like he's been constipated for at least a week, and the the back looks like a cheap anodized token from a casino.

I spent five of these around town today, just to see what kind of reaction I might get. Not much. Nobody asked what I meant by trying to pass these off as money. Nobody refused to take them. Only the cashier at the bookstore gave them a second look before she dropped them in her cash drawer with the dollar bills and made change.

We got a little more snow last night. Good thing, too. We needed more of that.

A rabbit exploring the patio caught my eye as I was washing dishes, so I grabbed my camera, but too late to catch the rabbit. The back yard had that weird beige sodium light over it, though, so I tried to catch it again with a snapshot. Mixed success with that, as always.

My kids grew up mostly in Aurora, Colorado, where it snows but not very often, and the snow melts almost right away. I still remember the first time I told them that, back in Wisconsin where I grew up, snow sometimes fell on the ground in November and didn't go away until March. I think that was the first time my oldest son thought I was flat-out lying to him.

At the Orpheum

Ripped from the headlines, or some bizarre kind of accidental haiku? Or both?