A long time coming...

This blog post has been a long time coming, that is!  I just got back from a trip to Seattle (!!!) and boy oh boy - I gotta tell you... talk about weather shock!  It was 72 degrees most day, sunny except for one cloudy drizzly day, and no humidity.  I slept with my windows open (no screens, but no bugs bothered me either!)

I spent a week on the campus of Seattle University attending a library conference/educational program called Immersion 2011.


The campus was simply astounding in its lushness.  Deep green beds of all kinds of wonderful plants, gardens and courtyards everywhere... and the lavender.  Wow.  So I'll just share some of my favorite pictures....

 See what I mean?







And since it was Seattle, a group of us ventured out to the famous Pike's Place Market to witness some fish tossing, glass blowing, coffee grinding and cruise ship docking.  It's right on Puget Sound, and (I'll say again) simply beautiful.

We also visited the Seattle Public Library, a wierdly famous library that is...goofy as all get-out.  (Really - check out the photo at the link!!)  They have one floor dedicated to conference room space.  The rooms are pleasantly pastel and comfortable.  The halls of the conference floor?

Red.  Everything.  Red. (And no, my camera wasn't malfunctioning!)  I kept thinking of bad Stephen King short stories - is was CREEPY.  The whole place is really industrial modern (*so* not my style) but I have to give them credit - while I don't like their form, the function was spot-on.  The six floors of book stacks were arranges in a gradual spiral, so you didn't have to navigate stairs to move from floor to floor (and in the core of the book spiral was a large lime-green escalator, so you didn't have to wind your way all the way up if you needed to go to the upper floors).

All in all, the conference was fantastic, I brought home some fabulous Caffe Vida coffee and Washington State wine, and I enjoyed the weather immensely.  But I'm a southern girl, and it was good to come back home to the deep south where mosquitoes thrive, the humidity curls your hair, and where folks know about sweet iced tea and grits.  Yeah.