Current location:	glendale, az
Current mood:	cranky
Entry tags:	arizona, matt, random

Last night
The third Thursday of every month, downtown Glendale has "That Thursday Thing," a free, themed event with music, activities, and extended hours in the shops. This month's thing was "The Bead Trail." You started at the Glendale Visitors Center, where you received a bag with a map, a coupon sheet, a small bar of Cerreta's chocolate (local downtown chocolate factory), and a zippy bag with one bead. The map had the locations of the beads, as well as where the musicians and other events were (such as free massages, cariacatures, half-price wine tasting), and which locations were restaurants.

I think there were ten bead stops, not counting the start (Visitors Center) and end (The Bead Museum, naturally). At the final stop, you got to assemble your beads into a bracelet (nothing special, just stretchy bead thread, with black wooden beads you could use as spacers). It wasn't as crowded or as centrally-located as Glendale Glitters and Glows (January, crowded with college football fans) or the Glendale Chocolate Affaire (February, all contained in the park). It was more spread out across both Historic Downtown and the "trendier" Catlin Court areas. It was neat to walk around, see what I recognized from the other times we've been down there, and hear Matt comment on how much of it has changed in the five years since he lived down there (his coffee shop is now a "lounge").

There are a couple tearooms, lots of antique stores, collectibles and knick-knack stores, and a lot of specialty restaurants. We might take some time today to go back downtown and just walk around, maybe get dinner since today's payday.

We're probably going to try to go again next year (I gathered, from comments at The Bead Museum, that The Bead Trail is a yearly thing). They haven't posted what next month's Thursday Thing is yet.

The only problem is that Thursday is book study, and we'd hoped to be able to finish before we had to leave, but I had to stick around an hour later at work, and we didn't get home until 6. So we ended up missing book study, which is Not A Good Thing. Plus, since we were trying to rush, I didn't take the time to remember what each bead was. There was a blue fish at the start and an irridescent fish at the end, a bone bead, a horn bead, a clay bead, a porcelain bead, a glass bead, an "eye" bead, a fimo bead, a mother of pearl dove bead, a glass heart, a berry nut (I think) bead, and two beads I can't remember: a little green one (Matt's was bigger and orange), and a big crackly yellow bead with red flecks.

Plus, to my eye, the beads were't "cohesive:" there wasn't a logical or a "good" way to string them together. After three different attempts, I finally gave up and just stuck them all on the cord. High fashion it ain't.