The View from the Office Window

The sun broke through an oppressively gray overcast yesterday morning as it rose but soon lost the fight and we didn't see it much for the rest of the day.

I got to look after Penny's fish while she was gone this week ...

It added a little splash of color to my cubicle.

Autumn in the Capital I

Madison has been awash in the familiar colors of autumn since the beginning of October, and now the leaves have begun to collect on the ground in windswept waves.

In the mornings, frost. At noon, temps in the fifties, and even that's fast becoming a fond memory.

To hasten the transition, all this week cold rain came spitting down from a cast-iron sky, forcing everyone to dig out their heavy coats. Noone's dallying on the streets.

Here's perhaps one last look at the capital while the leaves of autumn still frame it.

Autumn in the Capital II

The shops and restaurants around the square are dressed up in celebration of the harvest season.

Veedub on Carroll Street

This '71 Beetle was in pretty darned good shape, as well as being illegally parked. I hadn't noticed before that they had a rounded windshield; I'm used to the flat-as-a-pan windshield of the older models.

I Wish I'd Thought of That

Everybody else always gets the good ideas for their personalized plates.

The Great Onion of Life

Maybe it's time for this one to join the Great Compost Heap of Life.

A Travel Agent on State Street

I just don't know how to comment on that last one without offending everybody I know.

When your last name is 'Weiser' ...

... your nickname is always going to end up being 'Bud.'

Fall Colors In The Rain

Sorta perks up the bus stop, doesn't it?

Fall colors frame the Steensland Mansion

It used to be a thrift shop for the Bethel Lutheran Church but it's been closed now for quite a while. It desperately needs somebody to move in and make it a home (not a block of flats). If I had a million dollars ...

Riddle in the Fridge

I'm sure there was a very good reason for these three empty egg shells to be so carefully kept on a special plate in the back of the fridge. Maybe some day I'll even find out what it was.

Hideous Kinky

I took my camera to the streets of Madison over the noon hour, looking for a subject I worthy of these pages.

What would I find? Something with an autumnal theme? Something historical? Maybe college coeds enjoying the last warm days of summer?

And then my eyes beheld it: The ugliest apartment block I'd ever seen.

Hideous Kinky II

Truly, this is the hive-like living at its cubicle-worst.

Hideous Kinky III

The owner attempted to dress it up a bit with some colored flags. Looks like an art project done in the last fifteen minutes of the night before it was due.

Hideous Kinky IV

Please. This is too painful. Make the pain stop.

Looking down ...

I don't know what it means, but it was stuck to the pavement on 7th St NW

Beneath the Hirshhorn

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Washington, D.C.

Fountain at Hirshhorn Museum

Rubber stamps

An especially poignent exhibit at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.

Pushover.

Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.

Chromed merchant with dead bunny

At the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.

Mars Attacks!

These lamps frame the entrance to a cafe outside the National Gallery.

In the lobby at the National Gallery

This Calder sculpture swings and bobs in the updrafts.

On the lawn at the National Gallery

I'm pretty sure this is a spaceship masquerading as sculpture. Pretty clever camoflague, really.

Gen. George Meade gets some help with his coat

Join the army, work your way up to general, slaughter thousands of your opponents' troops and thereafter naked nymphs will attend to your every need.

I've heard about something like this ...

Death gets a nose job

Standing at the back of Gen. Meade's memorial, Death's impact is lessened somewhat by appearing to have a drunkard's nose.

Seen on the Streets of D.C.

This is the bicycle (tricycle?) I want for Christmas!

...and speaking of tricycles

This is the first time I've ever seen one on a bike rack.

The Old Post Office, Washington D.C.

Once the city's main post office, it was saved from demolition and is now a popular tourist attraction. Where they once sorted tons of mail on the main floor, there's now an open atrium surrounded by shops and restaurants. Worth a look, if you don't mind having your bags x-rayed on the way in (because, you know, this place has got to be high on the target list of terrorists the world over).

Views from the Old Post Office

The clock tower, now a tourist attraction, helpfully fitted with an elevator to the belfry. Quite a view of the city from the top.

Views from the Old Post Office

The clockworks — not at all what they usually show you in the movies, is it?

Views from The Old Post Office

Pennsylvania Avenue leading to the national capital.

Rainy Day, Chicago

I was laid over in Chicago for several hours on my way to Washington D.C. and took the opportunity to stroll through the Chicago loop. It was pretty crappy weather for shooting photos but I tried anyway.

Fisher Building, Chicago

The terra cotta entrance arch to this building was almost completely obscured by the iron trusses supporting an el train.

A Wise Old Owl in Chicago

These gargoyles look down from each corner of the public library. They're as big as helicopters and appear almost as suddenly when you round a corner and find them glowering down at you.

Chicago Public Library on a rainy day

Chicago's got a library that makes me want to live there. In Chicago, not the library, although there appeared to be a few people living in there, come to that; Madison's not the only place where hobos sleep in the carrels.

Scenes from the Ancestral Manse VII: Home-Grown Art

My brother, the artist. He fired the famous Frank & Beans wall hanging at my mother's window, and he penned this gorgeous India-ink rendering of a heavily-veined leaf.

What does he draw these days, I wonder?

Scenes from the Ancestral Manse VI: Vinegar Man

I don't think it was just me. I think the leering eyes and psychotic grin of this guy would frequent the nightmares of any little kid who saw them.

Scenes from the Ancestral Manse V: Mom's Window

Mom has turned the window over the kitchen sink into a sort of altar with knick-knacks commemorating places she's been and people she knows.

Everyone who stops by enters the house through the breezeway, so they have to pass through the kitchen, and they all seem to stop at the altar to view the knick-knacks, trying to spot the new additions, or guess if any have gone or been demoted to another part of the house.

When a new knick-knack appears, visitors point and comment, try to guess what it is, or pick it up and marvel at it if they already know.

I don't think she'll mind too much if we take a closer look:

One of my distant relatives on my mother's side was a cobbler, and the little wooden form that looks like a shoe is one of the tools he used in his shop.

Our immediate family once owned a small-town newspaper and, when we bought it, we came into posession of a staggering amount of type. Most of it was the tiny lead type used in setting newsprint, but we also ended up with a few boxes of very large type cut from wood. Mom saved a few pieces and spelled her name.

I have no idea where the chicken or the rose came from or what they're about.



Say hello to Vinegar Man. Both he and the tiny wash tub both belonged to my mother's mother at one time. I think. I'm sure Vinegar Man did because his bug eyes and psycho smile scared the bejeezus out of me when I was little and made quite an impression on me. He usually sat on grandma's countertop, or maybe on her windowsill.

If my memory's not playing tricks on me and the little wash basket was grandma's too, I think it sat on the edge of the sink and she used it to hold brillo pads or soap bars or something like that. It also gave me the willies because it's got a bunch of eye-like things that stared down at me.

Grandma used to scare me all the time with eyes, now that I think about it. For my birthday she gave me one of those clocks with eyes that flicked back and forth as it went tick-tock. The damn thing gave me nightmares after just one or two days hanging over my bed, and had to be returned.

I still don't like to look at the wash basket, but Vinegar Man's like an old friend.

Scenes from the Ancestral Manse IV: Grandma Lana's Dresser

Many moons ago, my mother dragged this dresser into the front entrance of the apartment we rented in Marquette. She slapped gallons of gelatinous "Zip-Strip" on it, peeling away layer after layer of paint and varnish, until she found this: A hand-carved pattern that she hadn't even been aware of. After cleaning it up the rest of the piece, she re-varnished it and it's been in the front room of our house ever since.

I've long assumed that this chest was just something she picked up at a garage sale, but I found out during our visit that it belonged to her grandmother Lana.

Scenes from the Ancestral Manse III: Grandma's Platter

The signs of the zodiac were set into the inner brass ring of this platter. It previously hung on the wall over the big red wing chair in the front room of my grandmother's house, but now it greets visitors to the O-family Ancestral Manse.

(Our family's ancestral hearth would more properly be in Door County, but as my mother now lives in central Wisconsin and it's closer and easier to get to I look there for Old Home.)

Scenes from the Ancestral Manse II: Great-Granpa Melchoir's Fiddle

I've never heard this fiddle played; I don't think it could be. Several strings appear to be missing, but at one time one of my great-granpas was known far and wide as a fiddle player who could be counted upon to deliver memorable music at a wedding dance.

In those days musicians took their pay in kind. After one performance great-granpa made his way to the house where he was supposed to be put up for the night. Finding nobody awake he let himself in and, rather than disturb the occupants he removed his shoes and tiptoed upstairs through the dark, feeling his way along the hall until he found an unoccupied room upstairs.

The floor felt odd beneath his stocking feet but he was too tired and pleasantly drunk to care. Flopping into bed he slept soundly until the next morning when he made his way down the hall toward the kitchen ... to find his footprints now firmly set in the fresh lacquer on the floor.

To add another complication to the poor man's situation, a quick look around made him realize he was in the wrong house.

He slipped out the back door and down the road undetected, and so far as I know the people in the house never found out who slept in their extra bed or left his tracks in their hallway.

Scenes from the Ancestral Manse I: Dad's Accordion

For years I assumed this old Horner accordion, which previously sat on display in my grandmother's home, was nothing more than a decorative item until one day when my Dad picked it up and cranked out three or four old-time tavern polkas and waltzes. Before that, I hadn't been aware that he had a musical bone in his body. People surprise you when you least expect it, doubly so your parents.

Lucky Star

Grafitti sprayed over the memorial to Elizabeth Link.

Elizabeth Link and her husband, Karl, were both very active pacifists, if that isn't an oxymoron, during the height of the Cold War.

Karl was faculty advisor at the UW for the student group American Youth for Democracy, and Elizabeth worked for Women's International League for Peace.

The park is on State Street, about halfway between the capitol and the university.

Sticker Schlock

I went to see the movie The War Tapes in a theater with a temporary stage that suggested it was also a part-time venue for garage bands.

On the way out I noticed these two stickers slapped on the exposed concrete ceiling, much too far out of reach to be worth the trouble to remove.

All I could find on Things Fall Apart was that they say their music falls in the genres of Middle Eastern, Top 40 and Traditional Folk. I imagine the Beatles during their sitar phase.

The Selfish Gene plays "original music that combines a mixture of rock, folk & psychedelia to share stories of the individual, society and universe." Hippies. Far out.

Window of J.Taylor's on Carroll St

Taylor's window has been a jumble these past couple weeks.

Okay, it's always been a jumble, but lately more so than before.

Mr. Taylor has recently posted signs promising that the store is undergoing a re-design and will open next week.

Friday On State Street

Looking up State Street from the corner of the Overture Center.

I'm standing on the 200 block, as the sign indicates, but that's the 100 block we're looking at.

On the right, under the red awning, a store that used to sell games such as Magic but is now nothing more than a front for a pair of cash machines.

Further up this side of the street, a clothing store in the old coal company building, two or three restaurant/bars that seem to be quite popular come lunch time, and at the far end stands Teddywedger's in what is claimed to be the oldest building still standing on Capital Square.