TheArtofNotGettingPublished: ABOUT THOSE VACATION PHOTOS...

Vacation was great.

We were in Vancouver and then Seattle. I don't take a lot of photos on vacation so you can't see us in Whistler, a ski resort 2 hours north of Vancouver, ziplining between two mountains. Yeah we did!! Nor can you see us attending a Saturday night Bard on the Beach production of Shakespeare's Love's Labor Lost, set in the 1920's with all kinds of Jazz Age choreographed musical numbers thrown in. It was a hoot! But here are a few Vancouver shots my husband took:

(outside our hotel with some serious eye-rolling by my daughter)

(Shannon Waterfall, just off the road to Whistler)

(some new friends)

(ditto)

(double ditto)

Nor do I have photos to display of our Underground Seattle Tour (which seemed to focus heavily on the city's history of sewage disposal) or of our Locked Room Challenge (which was cool, except that I discovered to my deep shame that I'm useless at locked room challenges. Everyone else in my family did really well though). I did force my daughter to pose for me at the wonderful Elliot Bay Bookstore

and my husband caught this lovely shot of me and my son at the aquarium gift shop:

But the only time I really pulled my phone out and started snapping pics is when we got to the Chihuly Garden and Museum, because it was absolutely incredible. First off, I should note that Dale Chihuly, one of the world's foremost glassmakers and a native of Tacoma, is a genius (I think that's beyond question) but is also completely whacked. This museum/exhibit space of his in Seattle has a café, where we ate lunch, but before you enter the café you walk past two enormous wall-hung exhibit cases displaying a tiny fraction of his collection of bottle openers. Two cases of bottle openers also hang in each of the nearby bathrooms. So you start to get a sense of why it might be called the Collections Café, but you don't really get it until you're seated in the restaurant and you look up to the ceiling and see this:

Those are accordions. Eighty-two of them on the ceiling, our helpful waiter told us. Less than a fifth of Chihuly's full accordion collection, which he stores at various warehouses. But if you thought that Chihuly only collects accordions and bottle openers, you were gravely mistaken. He has MANY other collections, including but not limited to: shaving brushes; pre-WWII string dispensers; mid-20th-century wooden dollhouse furniture; vintage radios; and a category called chalkware, which is so supremely creepy that I had to take two pictures of the huge display cases:

Okay, so there you have Dale Chihuly the Lunatic Collector. But there is also Dale Chihuly, the man who single-handedly revolutionized the art of glassmaking, and on this subject, I will just let the photos speak for themselves.