Trip report: Hands of the Hills on Mercer Island, Seattle area I found this recommended as a bead shop in one of the guide books I have. They have lots and lots of beads and beading materials, but they also have jewelry, handmade clothing, decorative home goods, Thai and Burmese silk fabrics, Kaffe Fasset cotton prints, wooden buttons, Obi fabrics, hemp fabrics in very good solid colors, and sewing patterns. They offer classes and are very friendly.

The latest Budget Living magazine has a thing on the slew of new candy flavored lip balms available, I want to get my hands on some Junior Mints, yummers. They also have an article about a toy I got at Christmas, Atari games in the old joystick, you just plug it into your TV and it's just like the old days. I played Adventure, seriously, for hours. How to choose the right pasta shape via The Morning News

I can get my webmail, but I cannot reach my old messages to hit the Reply button, so excuse me for a moment while I talk to a few people: Tracy and eveyone at the BBC stitch and bitch: I will miss you guys! Sorry I couldn't make it one last time, however I'll be in town after not too long and I'll check in to say hi! Hovey Lee: I saw you quoted in an article in the Palo Alto Weekly on what it's like to live near an Ikea!

I'm on the road, stealing bandwidth from the Haugheys to say hello. Hello! I like living out of suitcases (until you realize the batteries to power the iPod are somewhere at the bottom of the pile and there is no hope of retrieving them). Will be in Seattle soon, but I don't know when we'll find wireless next. Oregon is nice, wish you were here!

I have been researching Seattle fabric stores and so far have come across Nancy's Sewing Basket, Tina's On Madison, Lijepo for buttons, and Madame & Co. for ribbon. Reprodepot is moving out just as I am moving in (they closed thier store to retail traffic long ago so I suppose it's not too terrible a loss, but still, sniff). Are there other places (not Hancock or Joanns, pretty please) which I should check out? I'm willing to drive an hour to get there (however, with any luck it will not be the equivalent of driving up 880 to Poppy, something which always took a day and stiff drink to recover from). I hear wonderful things about Fabric Depot in Portland, which I will make a trip to.

Things to check out - Erica Mulherin's utterly adorable comic, and Brandy's amazing quilt and guestbook, Shannon's hand made shower curtain, and Whitney's embroidered handkerchiefs and martini tea towel.

Blogathon produced some really great stuff, one that I love is Chocolatada, 24 hours of talking about chocolate. Yum. Who knew dark chocolate had so many more anti-oxidants than broccoli? There is a chocolate blog from last year as well. So much information about chocolate! yay! Congrats to all the nominees for Blogathon awards, did you see that the Blogathon raised over $100,000 this year? wow.

I'm going to sound like a commercial for a moment*. For our trip to Seattle we used one of those cheap hotel sites to find a room in the downtown area, Priceline or Hotels.com or one of those. We ended up in a sweet place paying what we would have at the Holiday Inn Express (well, it would have been had we not used valet parking every day). The room was nice, the free high-speed internet was terrific for us since we were constantly looking through rental listings, the blackout shades went up and down automatically via a switch by the bedside, the closet had a light which went on automatically when you opened the door, there was a Starbucks in the lobby, but the highlight was the bathroom. It was huge, marble, and had a glass encased shower stall which was separate from the deep bath tub. I had to run out and buy some Mr. Bubble to properly enjoy it. I couldn't have asked for a nicer retreat after a day of driving around from address to address. * I know, I know -- when don't I?