Out and about during winter break

Because we live in Madison WI, a college town, we get winter break when the students are gone, basically New Year’s to MLK Day, with the town to ourselves. So we try to take advantage of the situation and go places that would otherwise be crowded.

There’s a restaurant downtown, Short Stack, that usually has a line out the door for its breakfasts. They’ve announced that after 10 years in business, they’re closing in May. It’s a cool place, woman-owned, and they’ve tried to do things to be sustainable and bike-friendly. They also had unusual hours when they first opened, like being open continuously from early morning on Thursday to midnight on Sunday, but after doing that for awhile and adding Wednesdays for awhile, and after pandemic, they now have more standard breakfast place hours, like 6:00-2:00 every day except Monday. I used to use their website in my web design classes as an example of a site that was so optimized for mobile it didn’t look so great on a “real” computer, but you can take your own look and decide. Anyways, we thought we should go before the students come back, so we got breakfast there Wednesday morning.

Like I said, I forgot to take pictures of our food but I got the short stack of the sweet potato pancakes and they looked like the below. Which confused Mark momentarily because he didn’t know why I got strawberries and he didn’t, not realizing at first that I got a different kind of pancakes from his buttermilk stack. He was also a little miffed because they put his pancakes on a small plate making it hard for him to build a stack with his eggs. I think Mark’s always been a bigger fan of the restaurant than me – he always tried to get all of our exchange students there for breakfast, for example. So maybe we’ll have to go back before they close, so his last meal ever there is more to his liking.

We’ve also been making the rounds of coffee places; cast has definitely made the scene with many cups of coffee.

Like everyone else, I’ve been scrolling through pictures of the L.A. fires and there were a couple by photographer Ariana Drehsler in the New York Times that are eerily beautiful shots of disaster.

And speaking of pretty pictures that I didn’t take, here are Nigel Slater’s and Mark’s photos of hoarfrost. Mark’s are from Christmas morning, Nigel some time in December.

And another thing I’m missing out on – here’s Jasper at home last Saturday.

And in case you’re wondering, I have been managing to cook one-handed quite a bit, I just haven’t been taking pictures. It’s the time of year when it’s dark too early to take pics of dinner, for one thing.