We made a "pre-closing inspection" of our soon-to-be home sweet home last Saturday. The seller has moved nearly everything of his out of the house, with the notable exception of about a dozen pairs of shoes. The few remaining odds and ends were apparently destined for the dumpster parked in the driveway.

We're counting the hours now ...

We've moved house so many times to date that we know this spacious-looking room will soon be impassibly clogged with stacks of boxes and haphazardly-arranged furniture. We think of that, and sigh.

But it'll be our clogged room. No more living like a peeg in Potter's Field!

I'll be grilling bratwurst on that deck soon enough! Okay, technically I'll be grilling brats on a Weber BBQ, because the deck by itself doesn't get nearly hot enough, but the Weber, the brats and I will all be on the deck.

And B is already planning to scatter pots of herbs here, to catch the morning sun.

To Market, To Market


My Darling B inspects the herbs on offer at the Dane County Farmer's Market, which opened for the season this weekend. She's already loaded up on baked goods, and she'll move on to the flowering plants next.

Grace Episcopal church through the weirdly-backlit oaks on the capital lawn.

The morning sunrise is reflected off the condos across Mifflin Street.

Maples are noticeably budding out, and the lawn is a beautiful spring green.

Where are the posts?

For some obscure, technical reason that must have to do with encroaching senility, I seem to have unlearned how to post photos to this site. I get the pop-up, I browse for the photos, I hit the upload button, and then ... nothing. No uploaded photo, just a blank page, and I can't figure out what's going wrong. For the time being, I'm loading photos up to a page on my web site.

Snow Returns to Madison



Everybody I knew was dreading the storm that was supposed to bring six inches of snow to Madison shortly after midnight last night. I'm possibly the only person in town who was disappointed to look out his window this morning to find a snowless driveway.

The storm struck shortly after seven o'clock this morning and left town in the late afternoon after dumping only an inch or so.

We could have had so much more fun, but here are a couple snaps of what we got.

The gable on the roof of Grace Episcopal facing Carroll Street, sporting a new throw of snow.

Quisling Terrace



On Gorham Street, this modest apartment building catches the eye, especially on a clear, sunny day like this.

Looking northwest across Gorham Street from the parking lot at Bethel Lutheran Church. The retro look is popular now; I wonder if the Quisling is popular by inference, or because the rents are low?

The Quisling comes from the Jetson-ish era when architecture featured fins, and lots of them.

The office entrance features this wrap-around concrete hood, punched through with futuristic holes. Steel grilles trim the windows and match the rail by the door.

The AT&T Building



From the visually creative Quisling, we shift to the blank and massive AT&T building on West Mifflin Street, four towering stories of oppressively drab, undressed concrete squatting like a Jawa sandcrawler on the south corner across Henry Street from the library.

For Sale At Auction

We've just returned from an estate sale. I believe there is almost nothing you can't find at these auctions. Case in point: Can you imagine anyone having this in the front hall? We have found all the typical Americana on sale, from beer signs to quilts to smut collections and every kind of furniture, but this five-foot-tall religious icon cast in plaster is a first.

Le Penseur ponders his muse.

We all have our price. What is The Thinker worth? I didn't stick around to find out.

A bit of Madison ephemera — a crate, sadly empty, from the Fauerbach brewery. Jim guessed it would go for quite a bit of cash, so I didn't stick around to find out. I had other fish to fry.

Jackpot! Five different treatments of the poker-playing dogs (the fifth was cropped out of the shot). They were only glossies clipped from the pages of a magazine, so I had high hopes of snagging the entire set for five or six bucks, but someone more exhuberant than I ran the bid up to eight dollars apiece. I'm pretty sure the frames weren't worth that much.

I've no idea what the strange mechanisms in this box were. If I had been strapped to a chair in a tiny cell with bright lights all around me and a grinning man in a lab coat opened this box in front of me, I would have been scared enough to sign any papers or tell him anything he wanted to know.

The dovetailed wooden box was very, very cool, though; I wanted it badly enough to stick around until it went on the block. They sold it and its weird contents for sixty-five dollars, much more than we had budgeted for that day.

Somebody liked owls.

A lot.

Quivey's Grove



A small, some would even say 'intimate' setting to enjoy a simple lunch. The venue was an old stone outbuilding in times past, but with the proper attention and this lovely addition they've added it's quite a cozy place.