State of the Knitted Blanket

So I finally got around to my mosaic project today.

Here's what it looks like after a little knitting today.

Fall Colors in Wisconsin

It's that time of year again. The bright yellows are everywhere, the shimmering orange and every so often those brilliant reds that demarcate the season. Now where was it so obvious as on my recent trip to Wisconsin! Just look at the way the colors combine together to give one chills down one's spine!

Luckily there is another show going on to take a look at while one is stopped for seasonal road work. The leaves were at their peak of color as I drove home from my Film and History conference.

 

I stopped at a rest stop that promised a scenic overlook. It was a location famous in the past for its abundance of passenger pigeons.

The sign promised an overlook, but it turned out not to be obvious where exactly that was. Then I noticed a little trail that led up a hill and through the woods. There were some absolutely gorgeous spots along the way.

 

I followed the path and it kept curving and leading upwards.

Some of the colors were as rich as I saw the whole trip.

 

 

Eventually the path led to a board walk, but it still continued upward.

And on I climbed

 

Luckily the journey is as important as the goal. When I arrived at the top, I discovered that the trees had grown up around the look out and so it was hard to tell there was an overlook. By standing on a bench on my toe tips and zooming the lens between two of the overgrown trees, I was able to snap this picture.

The roadside had even more beautiful colors.

 

Going around a curve you could look off in the distance and see colors across the huge panorama.

It was pretty amazing!

Even so, what made my heart skip a beat wasn't the colorful trees...

It was the capitol building in St. Paul that meant I was getting close to home!

A Safe House

One of the fun things I did in Milwaukee was visit the club called A Safe House. I already mentioned my fiasco at Trivia, but nonetheless, one of my most brilliant ex-students, a co-conspirator agreed to help me come in from the cold.

That's our winning trivia team a version of "The Landsharks", but missing its founder and some of its more prominent members who were not available that night.

Off we went to find "A Safe House", a notorious club where a secret agent on the run has to know the secret password to get in.

As you can see the door isn't obviously A Safe House.

Well, not too obviously.  Since we did not have reservations we were seated in the other half of the place, also interesting for its genuine historical interest. If those signatures are real there are a lot of famous people who have been at the Press Bar including many presidential types.

 and Al Cap, Art Buchwald, Walt Kell, even Al Franken. (I wonder if it is pre or intra political career.)

Our waitress brought us our menus and then "released" us to explore the spy-oriented premises.

The interior is so amusing and is full of "spy" memorabilia. To get in, one enters a room that looks a bit like a tiny waiting room - a woman sits in an arm chair reading and one has to tell her the password to get in. "Agents" that don't know the password are asked to do amusing things like sing songs or recite things in unison and their antics are broadcast on tv screens throughout the safe house. Entering the actual premises, you are met with this.

You can see one of those many tv screens on the right with the woman seated in her chair at the bottom of the screen.

There is so much to see. One big room looks like this.

 

Here is another part of the establishment. These are little private booths.

 

I laughed really hard I when saw this "Company Store" part.

There's a war room with a map that moves upward and has a screen for projecting films. There's a Chair too.

There are also some other silly things. We were given a paper with an assignment, that if we chose to accept would take us through the highlights of the place. Here are some of the funnier of those. That's me in the fun house mirror!

 

There's a red door to a men's room (like the ladies' room door on the left)  - but when you open it, you see a brick wall.

The ladies' room has a picture of Burt Reynolds and  if someone touches it in the wrong place, alarms go off all through the building. You can see that this is not a rare occurrence!

One of my favorite parts was this little model of Check Point Charlie. Since I actually got to leave East Berlin  through this check point it has special memories to me.

Nearby, in a glass case was a piece of the Berlin wall.

Next to it was a cool Octopussy poster in German.

 

The back room has this huge mural with all these great spy figures on it.

The other end of the room is sandbagged and there is a machine gun (prop? I hope) that was a gift from John Wayne above the door.

Here's a slightly better shot of the wall of spies.

It turns out that you can play with the wall by pushing the button, Max.

 

The top part shifts around and you get to see some other familiar faces on the necks of previous images.

When you leave you put a quarter in the pay phone and there is secret exit to the street. Of course neither of us had any change, so we had to leave by the plain old regular door, but that was okay. We had had a great time and certainly didn't care if others knew where we had been!