Gotham bagel / farmers' market / blog issues

If you've been reading this blog for a while you may remember I've talked about our upcoming move to Seattle. My husband has a new job there, and I seem to be retired - for the moment, anyway. We're renting our house to visiting professors from Norway, and renting a house in Seattle, just to make sure we really want to stay there. (If we decide to come back, we want to come back to our house!) It's a continuing effort to sort through all our stuff and save only what we really need (or REALLY want) and clear out the house for the renters. It's horrible, really, and sometimes it feels like we'll never get done.

The date that we'll leave here is coming up fast, and there are so many people to spend one more hour with, and places to visit one more time. On a recent Saturday we went downtown to meet a friend at the Farmers Market, to shop and get something to eat at a favorite breakfast spot. Because of car trouble and then a traffic jam, the friend never made it, but my husband and I proceeded without her, grateful that she'd lured us out of the house.

One of our favorite places to eat breakfast is Gotham Bagel. It was started by a transplanted New Yorker who couldn't find a real East Coast bagel here in the Midwest. There are those that say New York bagels are the best because of the water, but NYC water was brought here and bagels made with it were compared to bagels made with local water to check that theory. Disproved! There are plenty of bagel shops here, but anyone looking for the dense, chewy bite of deliciousness that we East Coasters know as a genuine, hand-rolled, boiled bagel, were bound to be disappointed. And because Gotham Bagel's founder was strongly influenced by his veg aunt and uncle, he provides delicious vegan alternatives to the usual bagel toppings. There are three choices of vegan artisan cream cheese as well as various vegan salads. My favorite breakfast is the "V." I usually get it on pumpernickel bagel, but sometimes I go for sesame. It's a hard choice! The "V" I had recently (pictured above on sesame with a thin cinnamon-raisin bagel chip) contains scallion tofu cream cheese, roasted poblano peppers, tomato, arugula and avocado, and I never get tired of it. I've never even tried the other vegan breakfast. When we leave Madison, this is one of the places I'll miss.

Gotham Bagel is just a step away from the downtown Madison Farmers' Market so we visited out favorite farm stand, Harmony Valley Farm, just after we ate. Good timing, right?

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Blog goes berserk - attempts to dismantle computer

One of my wonderful readers has informed me that when she tries to leave this blog, dozens of windows start opening, and her Internet Explorer crashes! She uses a pc, and when I tried to reproduce this effect on my husband's pc, I was unable to do so. I've made blogger inquiries to see if there's some problem with my blog but so far no one has been able to view this phenomenon. It was suggested to me that she may have malware on her computer or may have a corrupted version of IE that needs replacement. Since this only happens with my blog, I'm not sure what to think. Is anyone experiencing a similar problem, or have insight as to why this is happening? If there's a problem on my end I certainly want to correct it. Can you help?