"Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, recovering from shooting, regains ability to speak — asks for toast..."

Toast!

("Breaking news" email from CNN. Story here.)

"This looks good," I said...

... and iChatted Meade this link... and it's for dinner tonight!

ADDED:



AND:

Althouse's needs are met!

We're happy to find a place that might be okay, open for lunch in New Richmond, Wisconsin. Bellarietta. I misread it as Bellateria and joke that it's deleterious.



I'm cheered by the colored pencils and paper-topped table. (You know how I feel about drawing on table-paper. ("1 part Homer + 1 part Moai + a dash of Redon + sprinkle with love = Meade.") Ha. Those links go to last summer, in the early days of the Meadhouse marriage.) And there's a book too, in case we run out of amusing things to say: "The Little Book of After Dinner Speeches."



(Enlarge to read the text of the open book... and the messages we've penciled on the table.)

After extensive consultation with our excellent server Tanya, I trusted them with a Philly steak sandwich and Meade, oddly enough, went for a black bean burger. It looked like this and tasted as good as you'd hope upon seeing it, and it's hard for bread to meet my high standard:



Computer on the table? Damned right: There was WiFi! Yay! The wifie got her WiFi, and her hubby is happy with that. So marriage can work. It was possible to find a husband who suited my eccentric needs.



And it was possible to find a great place to eat in this little town in the middle of Wisconsin.

Life is good!

"The baguette scene could not have been simpler, but Carla wanted to make it a big one."

French First Lady Carla Bruni, doing a Woody Allen movie.

How do you manage the day's last spurt of energy?

"The way I do it, there are still 56 minutes left to watch two episodes of The Brady Bunch on TV Land and I [have] enough energy to go downstairs and make a ham and swiss with horseradish, tomato and lettuce on artisian bread during the first commercial break. If I watch The Brady Bunch first, and Marsha's in it a lot, then we're down to two minutes."

A Meadhouse mountain range...

... of bread.



Meade advocates keeping bread in this position. You don't need to wrap it up. Just put the cut side of the loaf down on the cutting board and it will stay fresh just as long. This assumes you've got "artisanal" bread. I don't argue about such things. But I do photograph them sometimes when so many artisanal loaves have lined up on the cutting board.

"This is no time to be FRAIL!"

Eat bread.

At the Checkout Café...

... choose carefully.

"Schabhuttl wanted a roll. Egan, however, wanted him to eat sliced bread."

"'He said that when he refused, she attacked him with the steak,' reported Deputy Carmen Gallup, who noted observing slight redness on Schabhuttl's right cheek and the crown of his head. While Egan denied wielding the steak, she admitted slapping Schabhuttl several times 'so that he can learn.'"

"Are You an Eco-Douchebag?"

Your reaction to this sign will answer the question:



(Via Boing Boing.)

Breadscape.

***

Now, I could have called this "At the Breadscape Café..." with "... you can talk about anything" — or "anything you knead to" as one wag suggested — but then somebody — I'm not naming names — would have felt compelled to say that I'm relying too much on open threads, as if I hadn't done the photographs at all. The open threadiness ought to be appreciated as an extra dimension to the photography posts, to give you something to talk about other than whether it is or is not a nice photograph. But I've got other mountains to climb. So I'm calling this "Breadscape."