Fete de La Musique du Milwaukee

This here's a picture of the Zoe at Milwaukee's Bastille Days. The Eiffel-like tower behind her was rigged up by the Milwaukee School of Engineering, an institution which provided many back-packed students for me to try and not hit with my car on the way to work. I was usually successful. Milwaukee is a city that knows how to party in an international sort of way, and mid-July brought us this French fete. I'm not sure why, but this year was the first year we actually went to the party, even though it was highly recommended by many of our friends many years running.

There were several bandstands set up by the city, and filled with local musicians. I was surprised to see that next to none of the bands were playing anything in french, or france-related. This is probably because the majority of the fair-going public are not very entertained by accordian-accompanied schmultz in a foreign language. Honestly, France has severely dropped the boule when it comes to intriguing modern music (-M- excluded). Instead we got to enjoy yet another medley of Johnny Cash songs at least an octave and a fourth too high. Oh, and Celtic music...shudder.

Regardez s'il vous plait how awesome this Bastille Days poster is! Oui, oui, I know that this isn't the poster that goes with the year we actually went, but I liked the 2006 poster a lot. I gotta give Milwaukee a lot of credit for making this festival loads of fun, they had a bunch of street performers and murals all over the place. Did you see the cool aerial photograph of Cathedral Square that I stole off the internet (above)? Looks like quite the good time. I'll never forget the year that we were actually at the Eiffel Tower on Bastille Day, what an awesome experience. To tell you the truth if you were to replace the music, and the beverage, this party would have been very similar to the Fete de la Musique held in Paris every June 21st. Everyone in the city is encouraged to perform music outside their houses/offices and get totally wasted on wine and European adrenaline. That was a grand time in Levallois. I love Milwaukee in the Summer time.

Mount Horeb Mustard Museum

The Mount Horeb Mustard Museum was conceived and created by none other than the assistant Attorney General of Wisconsin. There are over 4,800 different types of mustard in there. Unfortunately, the place was closed so we couldn't go in and sample the mustard. Shameful. Instead we could only look into the window and drool. It makes sense to me that the world's largest collection of mustard would be located in a part of the country so overflown with sausage.

I'd also like to include this picture that Sara had me take outside of one of the local pubs. I swear this was all her idea.

The Wisconsin Trollway

During our trip to Madison we couldn't pass up the short ride to Mount Horeb so we could take a ride down the legendary Trollway; a road lined with troll statues. Weird. Here are a few pictures of Zoe and I with our favorites. This was during Zoe's "hug all tall wooden objects" phase, so we had to stop at each one so she could get to know him or her at a very personal level. We found a map online that supposedly shows the location of all the trolls, but there were nowhere near as many as the map claimed. Perhaps some of them went back to their beloved Norway before the cold winter set in. If any of you ever make your way to Mount Horeb, it's probably best to do it at the beginning of the summer before the annual troll migration begins. I wonder why we didn't stop by Chris Farley's grave while we were in Madison? That would have been a good photo opportunity to feed our strange hunger to visit the burial locales of the famous.

The Wisconsin State Capitol

The Wisconsin State Capitol Building is the prettiest capitol building I've ever seen. Inside and out it is absolutely gorgeous. The building is a great big "X" with each "X" arm pointing out to the cardinal directions. Isn't it wild what kind of amazing things people can build? I look around at a building like this and I just can't fathom the work it must have taken to build it. And then I consider that this is but one of 50 state capitol buildings in our country, and each of them are unique, and most are beautiful. I just spent far too much time looking at pictures of state capitol buildings on wikipedia. That's an hour of my life I'm never getting back.

I like that the insides of the building are all different colors. From the second floor you can look down on the floor below the dome, and wave as your favorite state legislators walk by. The design of the inside actually reminded me a lot of Napoleon's tomb in Paris, just picture a giant gold-encrusted casket sitting below the dome and you've pretty much got a twin building. I wonder why they put such a short guy in such a huge casket. The building is all full of stairs, 2,782 of them, which rendered the place a virtual jungle gym for the Zoe. As I was chasing her from one staircase to the other, we came across original replicas of the Liberty Bell and the Wisconsin state constitution. Pretty exciting. The Wisconsin state capitol building is only three feet shorter than it's mommy in Washington D.C.

Since blogging about state capitol buildings is pretty much the pinnacle of internet-excitement (we should get YouTube out here to film it!), I think I should definitely tell the story of why the preceding Wisconsin state capitol building burnt down. Here's the shortened version: In February of 1904 the freshly repainted ceiling caught fire and the blaze slowly began engulfing the building. Since the nearby reservoir was empty, the state called in a firefighting crew from Milwaukee to bring water to the site and douse the flames. Unfortunately, en route all their equipment froze beyond use, and they had to watch as the entire North, South and West wings of the building burnt completely to the ground. I wonder why they didn't just put the equipment closer to the giant flames and let the fire thaw it out. Perhaps the frigid temperatures had effected their judgment. I just think it's hilarious that my previous state of residence lost its capitol building due to the state's most unappealing feature - locals with frozen brains.

I thought it was sad to read that the fire of 1904 destroyed the taxidermied remains of Old Abe the Civil War eagle. He was a vicious bald eagle that the Wisconsin 8th Infantry carried with them into battle during the first part of the war. Old Abe would scream and yell and raise a ruckus and the rebels would run away squealing like little girls. History says that Old Abe lost feathers to bullets and passing generals would tip their hats to him. Old Abe became the model for the 101st airbourne's Screaming Eagle patch, and the Case tractor company logo. There's a replica of Old Abe in the capitol building now, but that's just not the same.

Strawberry Days in Cedarburg

These pictures were taken in Cedarburg, Wisconsin during their annual Strawberry Days festival in early June. There's absolutely nothing interesting about Cedarburg except that the locals worship strawberries and drink a lot of beer. Actually, the only reason I'm including these pictures on the blog is that I really like this giant Leinenkugel's chair. I thought it was pretty hilarious to watch the chair security guard try to stop all the kids from sitting in the chair without spilling his beer. Heaven forbid that someone sits in a chair! I miss the summer.

Where Ma was born

That's right, this is the actual birthplace of Ma Ingalls. Strange how her parents named her Ma. What if she'd have become a non child-have-able person? I've always had this same question about the Berenstain Bear family. The reason we decided to not call Zoe "Sister" is that we wanted to try her on for size before we committed to providing her a sibling. But speaking of sisters, if any of you were one, or had one, you probably watched Little House on the Prairie while eating your after-school snack. As you likely know, Caroline Lake Quiner Ingalls most certainly did have children, and depending on which season you watched, most of them lived. She was born just down the road from us in Brookfield, Wisconsin. Charles Ingalls came along when Caroline was 21, they got married, and eventually moved from the big woods to the Minnesota prairie. Sara and I spent most of last year watching the entire series of Little House and we learned a lot from Caroline Ingalls, mostly that no matter how hard a modern woman tries, she can never hope to become as domesticated as the frontiers woman. Thanks a lot Caroline. No worries though, we men are just as unlikely to measure up to Charles Ingalls, we're just not hard-working or dreamy enough. This here's a picture of Charles and Caroline, she's the one on the left. Wow, he looks just like Michael Landon...not.

We probably drove by this sign a hundred times before we finally stopped and read it. We got pretty excited and took a bunch of pictures. When we moved out to Wisconsin we drove on I-90 past Walnut Grove. I really wish we would have stopped to take some pictures of the area. This is just the sort of thing that really floats our boat(s) nowadays. Why did old western people insist on living in freezing areas? I mean why didn't Charles and Caroline just pick up and move to Florida instead of staying in the midwest? Yeah yeah, I know, probably because the land was all but free in our nation's armpits, and you can't grow the same crops in the midwest as you can in other places, but seriously? Minnesota? Of course, this is coming from a guy that moved his family to Milwaukee. Humans are strange.

The Organ Piper

Here’s a picture of the Zoe and I at our favoritest pizza place in the whole wide world…well at least in Milwaukee anyway. This is a place that Donny introduced us to right after we moved to Wisconsin, and we became instant addicts. Every year Zoe wants to go to Organ Piper Pizza, mostly at my behest, for her birthday dinner. This place is awesome, they’ve got a gigantic Wurlitzer organ that makes all sorts of great little toots and woots. All the drums and xylophones and keyboards surround the pizzateers in the dining room and they’re all run from the single consul by a single organist. There’s even a line of ducks that jump and quack their little songs. At the end of patriotic numbers a great big flag comes down from above and all sorts of lights run around. Great times. The dude who plays the organ takes requests, and he always does mine, especially when I ask for the Beatles. Their pizza ain’t so bad either. I like it there a lot, but you don’t have to take my word for it, you Milwaukeeans ought to go try it out now (be sure to bundle up). I’ll never forget how much I loved nights at Organ Piper Pizza watching the locals dancing their polkas while I drank Sprechers root beer. What a great place.