Glass and Snow

A while back, I bought two passes to the Museum of Glass in Tacoma from Living Social.  The half price price was particularly attractive because we hadn't been particularly excited by it the one other time we visited.  This time was a very different story.  Two exhibits in particular, Glimmering Gone by Ingalena Klenell and Beth Lipman and Kids Design Glass really blew us away.  Unfortunately for all of us, we weren't allowed to take pictures in the galleries.  Glimmering Gone had this really amazing installation piece that was a forest made out of many many different pieces of clear glass hanging from the ceiling.  It's hard to describe in words and the pictures on the website don't do it justice.  If you live in the area, I recommend you go see it.  Kids Design Glass is this amazing project that the Museum does where children who visit the museum (or are receiving treatment at an area children's hospital) can draw pictures and write artist's statements that they submit to a monthly contest.  The Museum then chooses a drawing each month to be reproduced in glass by a glass artist.  The glass pieces are displayed with the original drawings and artist statements.  Totally amazing and inspiring and hilarious.

Here are a few pictures I took of the glass installations outside of the museum.

Before we headed out this morning, it occurred to me that I still needed to visit a new park this month.  I did a little searching on the interwebs and came up with Delong Park.  Margo was initially not enthused at all because it was COLD today.  When we pulled into the parking lot, her enthusiasm dropped even further when we saw what appeared to be a field with a track around it.  We soon found a trail leading into the woods with views of the wetlands.  We had been hoping to see some birds, but the snow and iced over water resulted in us seeing only a lone seagull.  But it was really beautiful in spite of all of that.  Here are some pictures as proof.

I was especially fascinated by the juxtaposition of snow and moss, as you can see from a couple of my pictures.  All in all, a pretty good outing, and a park that I may want to revisit in nicer weather.

We also did some thrift store shopping on the way home.  We scored some pretty good deals, including a bunch of picture frames, a cool green glass jar and a few other fun things.  Margo broke my heart when she wasn't impressed with the dining room table I fell in love with.  I've never been so upset about a piece of furniture before.  I literally almost started crying in the store.  But ultimately it's important that we're both on board with major furniture pieces.  So we'll keep looking.