Grrr, they’ve taken my captions away.
I abandoned my old friend Portfolio Slideshow (and so has word press as far as I can tell) because I couldn’t get the captions to work, and started using Responsive Slider by Supsystic, that I upgraded yesterday, and now its captions don’t work either – or at least, I think they only work in one slider theme, and it’s the one I don’t like as well. See:
Cleaner version that I like (with captions back after another upgrade, on Thursday morning!)
Messy, with captions that only sort of work
Although, hmmm – if I am going to use a slideshow with no captions, perhaps this built into word press version of something like portfolio slideshow is the way to go?
[portfolio_slideshow pagerpos=”disabled”]
All of which means I am messing with pictures on my blog, when I am supposed to be working; it’s Wednesday and Spring Break is kind of over for me.
I have been having a pretty nice spring break. We started out by pretending to be tourists in Madison, combining long walks and eating out, which is what we usually do in cities we’re visiting. Friday I had a lot of books to pick up at the library, so after work, we walked over and split a pizza & a salad at Luigi’s, the Food Fight pizza place that’s in the same strip mall (Madison Public Library puts all its branches in strip malls). Saturday we walked to the Farmers Market and the line wasn’t out the door at Short Stack, which we’d kind of been wanting to try (and whose website I like to use when I teach web design as an example of a site that’s been so optimized for mobile it doesn’t look so good on a bigger computer), but I wanted to make dinner – mac & cheese with roasted cauliflower, and salad that we’d just bought greens for – so we passed. On Sunday when we tried again, the line was out the door, so we went to another Food Fight joint, Bassett Street Brunch Club. Which was OK, but not our favorite meal ever – my breakfast burrito was fine, although more than I could eat, the chile sauce topping it was just the right amount of heat and sweet, but the donut was just sort of weird – sweet and soft with no nice fried crust, but a not very pleasant fore-taste of fried oil. And Mark’s eggs and potatoes and toast were all tasted fine, too, but only the eggs were still hot.
On Saturday I worked, but stopped in time to do a bunch of cooking – granola and I tried out the slutty brownies recipe, and finally did make the mac & cheese – we didn’t eat dinner until about 8:15. On Sunday it was breakfast out, then a little more work. I sliced up the brownies and we had them with ice cream and the last of the date bars and Sunday night TV.
On Monday morning we drove to Harvard and got the train to Chicago. We shopped at Whole Foods, for the first dinner party at the Chicago apartment. Here’s the menu:
- Food52 honey miso roast chicken – made as is except I peeled the garlic.
- Clotilde’s charred broccoli and avocado salad which was really surprisingly good, except I should have heeded her advice to really char the broccoli – or at least roast until it was a touch softer.
- Boiled potatoes that I imported from WI, doused with scallion butter, to soak up the good sauce from the chicken.
- Milk chocolate pudding from this Melissa Clark recipe; I often have trouble with her recipes but this worked fine; I left out the bananas and cookie crumbs and just dolloped on whipped cream and served with the slutty brownies.
A fine time was had by all.
Tuesday I went to meet a techy librarian friend for coffee while Mark tried for Lollapalooza tickets and ran an online meeting. We met up at the Water Tower, split a Starbucks yogurt parfait, and walked down the lakeshore path through Maggie Daley Park and back to the apartment.
We took John out for dinner at this Chinese BBQ joint. Which was huge and cafeteria-like and very clean. Service was odd – they seemed to have one senior waiter with an iPad take your order, but then anyone else who was passing by would bring the your food – really kind of wander over with your food. We ordered way too much food – BBQ over rice and two soups – but, since each dish was like $8, it only totaled up to about $54 for all of us – $60 with the tip. We should’ve pre-ordered a duck. They come with the little white dumpling buns and tamarind sauce. Next time we’ll know better. We thought it was BYOB, too – but that’s only for wine – so John had a sixpack of Goose Island IPA to take home with his jar of granola and some leftover meat.
