At the coffee shop yesterday noon:

When it comes down to the last stale bagel, they should swap out "day-old" for "lonely, lost, and desperately in need of a home."

The slate-gray edifice of the state office building looms against the slate-gray overcast of an afternoon sky.

It's no Chrysler Building, but the state office building is ornamented with and art deco facade that gives it a lot of character and makes it one of my favorite downtown buildings. The city-county building (next to it on the right) is a practically featureless, pale blockhouse in comparison.

The building's design makes it appear large and yet reserved. Stately, I guess. You can make out more details of the art deco design.

Bonkers calls dibs on the warm sunny patch.

What is it about a napping cat that makes people smile? Nobody in our family can look at Bonkers sleeping in the sun and suppress at least a grin. He is the picture of contentment when he has a warm spot where he can curl up like a rolley-pollie and snooze until the sun slides too far away.

(Just how do you spell "rolley-pollie" without the first half mispronounced by most of the population? When it's "roll" nobody has any difficulty saying it right, but when it's "rolley" or "rollie" or "rollee," almost anybody I know would say RAH lee. So a standard spelling, please, for the bug that sounds like ROE lee POE lee.)

When I come back, I want to be a housecat, but not just any housecat: I want to be Bonkers, right here, in the sun, at this moment. What a life.

... and then, whatever the polar opposite of "contentment" is, that's a hungry cat. Bonkers is one of the warmest, friendliest, lapmost cats I've ever met, but when he wants his kibble he's the most relentlessly annoying, bar none, of any pet. I would never intentionally hurt a pet, but when he's hungry and underfoot it's almost impossible to walk to the kitchen tap to get a drink without punting him between the goalposts. There must be a way to cure him of this, but short of feeding him until he explodes, I don't know what it could be.

I hate being a showoff, but I can't resist - some of the views around our new home are really very photogenic, and I don't think it's only because I'm a proud papa.

These wildflowers grow in the grass strip between our garage and the neighbor's yard. The dandelions I recognize, but I don't know what the plants with the blue blossoms are called. I'll have to do a little learning after having a good look around.

The bumblebees love these blue flowers; I was trying to catch a snapshot of the one that darted away just before I clicked the shutter.

Packing out of the rental apartment. We've been living here for nine months, but we won't miss it for a second. So long, broken fridge door handle! Farewell, laundry room as big as a phone booth! See ya, stinky sewage-soaked basement rug! Good-bye, garage door that doesn't open from outside!

The crew that made our move from the apartment possible! From left, Barb, Jim, Darren, Sue, Carrie and Tim. Behind them, Darren's monster trailer, pulled by Darren's monster pickup truck, into which all our belongings fit without the least bit of trouble. We're outta here!

The new abode was ready in nearly all respects, with a few small touch-ups needed here and there. Tim painted the kitchen cupboards for his Mom.

Most of hour household goods have been in storage for almost a year! The challenge: Make it all fit into our snug little home.

Moving our few possessions from the apartment was easy; stowing all the household goods we had held in storage was quite another problem altogether. Barb spent days trying to figure out how to arrange all the kitchen utensils, pots and pans, plates and flatware so that it would fit in the older, smaller kitchen layout of our home.

It's not a home without a cat or two underfoot ... or, in this case, on your seat.

The missus and I would like to express our kindest thanks for your congratulations and shared stories of home ownership.

We're just a little giddy about the prospect of owning our own home again. Maybe you can tell?

Barb watches happily as I sign away our paychecks for the next thirty years. We felt much less nervous about it this time around (we were homeowners in a previous life).

The sun rose on our last full day in Cottage Grove today. After the closing, we ate lunch on the kitchen floor of our very own house.

One of the oddest-looking buildings in Madison has got to be Best Western's "Inn On The Park," the hotel at the corner of Main and Carroll streets. If you're walking south along Carroll and look up, you'll see a rather boring-looking typical hotel building with no distinguishing features, other than the odd-sized picture window below the top floor.

Draw a little closer, though, and you see a different building ... it almost looks like two buildings: one slightly more interesting high-rise with wider, more visually interesting bay windows on the lake side, being swallowed by the blocky, boring chunk of a building, which has the appearance of having descended from space, possibly to transmogrify all our beautiful old architecture into Soviet-style block houses.

Look at that lovely scalloped corner, fighting to hold off the blockification crushing down on it. There was so much potential for this building until the architectural firm of Nickolai Ivanovich Sovietsky & Assoc. took over the design project and turned it into an experiment in nuveau concret.