In Seattle

First of all there's a goldfish in our room. Its name is "Taina".

In general, it's being a pretty typical conference - too long, too exhausting - today is Monday; I have been here since Thursday - I am so ready to go home.

This conference seems to be characterized by lots of librarians fearing and thinking about being displaced by Google - and in a sort of cosmic payback, the more scared they are, the more real their fears are. The ones who aren't scared are the more creative ones, who see all the ways that librarians are still needed even now that most information needs are satisfied with a Google search.

And typical of conferences, I've eaten some nice things and some not so nice things, but almost none of it was what I was truly hungry for at the time. Like Saturday, we passed through two receptions with fancy food, tiny pastries like apricot petit fours and liquer glasses with passion fruit mousse; sushi, and goat cheese tarts with sundried tomatoes on top, and then went to a restaurant, Wild Ginger, that specializes in Asian fusion and sates, but we got there quite late. I ate a tofu sate that was perfect, hard, with glazed soy-y edges, and a 5-spice beef one, and part of someone else's spring rolls, and a ginger vodka martini, that was just gingered enough - I ordered bok choy, but did not eat too much of that - too late, too much other stuff in my stomach. This morning, when we arrived at the 8:00 a.m. meeting that my sweetheart had to lead, at about 7:45, there was fruit, coffee and sweet rolls already on the table - the pastries all looked pretty gooey - I had a small whole wheat croissant, but I still had to wonder if it actually had more fat than the gooey ones. Waiters brought around plates of bacon, eggs, and potatoes after you ate the fruit, but I just wasn't ready for that much food. Instead I went to the market at lunch time, and got a DeLaurentis paninni, and also bought $60 worth of smoked salmon to take home

Yesterday afternoon, I took a break from conferencing, and went to the new Olympic Sculpture Park with my brother and niece and sister in law. I took lots of pictures - this is only a few.


We also did a modified version of Deb-shops-at-Pikes-Place-Market-and-cooks-dinner for everyone -

we shopped at this gigantic Whole Foods instead, after fighting crowds at the scultpture garden (and going around and around looking for a place to park) my brother really did not want to go to the market. I got museum fatigue from the Whole Foods, though - so much opulent stuff on display.

I made toasted pasta with a mushroom ragout, based on a (much more difficult) recipe from the January Gourmet - the Gourmet recipe, by Lidia Bastianich, has you make the pasta from scratch, and serve it with a sauce made from duck meat. I just bought the pasta and toasted it, but it sure was good. And Mimi and I made a giant oval apple-cherry pie - and five of us polished off half of it.