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Had a fabulous tour with Mary Beth and Susan today called “Chocolate, Waterfalls and Wine” – hard to think of any other combination more appealing to me unless it had been called “Shakespeare, Frank Lloyd Wright and ACC Basketball”! We started at Boehm’s Chocolate’s just outside of Seattle. Handmade chocolates, free of preservatives, housed in a lovely Swiss chalet and absolutely delicious. Then on to lunch and Snoqualmie Falls for a quick view of the falls. We finished the day at Chateau St. Michele for a great and informative tour of their winery. Mary beth and Susan will give their takes, but I’ll pass on this fact: Sweeter wines are sweeter because they bring the temperature way down thus making the yeast inactive and stopping it from using up all the sugar in the wine. We tasted, we purchased and we headed back to the Convention Center. Susan will put pictures up soon!!

Lynn gave a great summary of the really good keynote speaker Rushworth kidder, but I’ll share a great story he told. While researching for a book on e.e. cummings, he came across cummings’ handwritten copy of his poem “Buffalo Bill’s” with a reference to an obituary for Buffalo Bill. He hunted down the obit and found in it several of the phrases cummings uses in the poem. No one knew of the obit or had ever connected it to that poem. Those who know me know I love stories of discoveries made while researching in libraries, so you can see why I love this.

I thought another interesting point he made was to say that ethical delimmas can essentially be boiled down to one of four things: Truth vs. Loyalty, Individual vs. Community, Short-term vs. Long-term or Justice vs. Mercy. He also gave a definition of ethics that I liked “obedience to the unenforceable” and made the point that as a society, if we let our ethics erode, law will inevitably try to fill in the void. His speech was really inspirational and once again made me proud to be a librarian! We Rock!