About 6 years ago, I was visiting my friend, Robert, in Seattle. While in downtown, I visited the Westlake Shopping Center and ended up buying a necklace in a shop there that is like an artists co-op. It was a really simple necklace - a black leather choker with a red enamel charm surrounded by silver and the Chinese symbol for love on it. It was my favorite necklace, and I wore it almost every day for years, but lost it when we visited Dallas months ago.

Now, Rob is preparing to leave Seattle and move back to Portland. Since he's currently out of work and has plenty of time for field trips, I asked him for a favor before he left. I asked if he could go to that mall, try to find that store, and buy me another necklace if they had it. (I'd visited the same store about a year ago when visiting and saw they still carried that necklace). I told him there was a photo of me on Facebook wearing that necklace so he could see what it looked like.

Today, Rob relayed to me that he had done his homework. He went down to the Seattle Center where the Space Needle is, parked his car, and took the monorail to the mall (which is at the terminus of the line). He said he went to every jewelry store in the mall and showed them the photo of me in the necklace, asking if they had it. No one did. He ultimately found his way to the artist co-op and finally found someone who recognized the necklace. The guy at the store said, "Oh yes, we used to carry that." Rob asked, "Used to?" The salesman said they unfortunately no longer worked with that artist, but went back into his files and found the name and phone number of the artist to give to Rob.

Rob went home, looked the artist up on the internet, and saw she sold her stuff at two other locations in Seattle. Unfortunately, a couple of phone calls later, he found neither of them carried that specific necklace. Rob is very tenacious. If you give him a task, he will try as hard as he can to follow through. He found the artist's web site and e-mailed her to tell her about the necklace and to ask if she still made them. He's still waiting to hear back. I'm hoping she still has them and can sell me one.

Ironically, the artist is in SoCal and I probably could have easily gotten ahold of one if I had looked when I was still there.

***UPDATED***
So, Rob texted me earlier to say he had heard back from the artist. She said she no longer makes that particular necklace...but is going to go out of her way and make one just for me! How cool is that?