Nancy Amidei wearing a chocolate crown presented to her on Nancy Amidei Day. Amidei and her colleagues celebrated the occasion with one of her favorite vices - chocolate. Photo By Kathy Sauber

NANCY AMI-DAY: Seattle Mayor Paul Schell recently proclaimed Oct. 10 to be Nancy Amidei Day. Amidei’s associates at the School of Social Work and throughout the community celebrated with a morning full of festivities, highlighted by a reading of Schell’s proclamation. The mayor encouraged all citizens of Seattle to honor this “extraordinary individual and her creativity, hard work and perseverance.” Amidei is a senior lecturer in the school and has been serving as chair of the Partnership for Youth since its inception in 1993. The organization advocates for current and former street youth in the Seattle area.

DISTANCE ED: Ed Lazowska, chair of the Computer Science & Engineering Department, has received a national award for his work in distance learning. R1edu, a consortium of 30 leading U.S. research institutions that offer distance learning programs, included Lazowska in its first-ever round of awards to recognize faculty who have made significant contributions to the field. In announcing the awards, the group cited a long list of Lazowska’s accomplishments, including video-streaming lectures over the Web for a professional master’s degree program, creating dozens of multicourse certificate programs for IT professionals, expanding on-line technology education to local community colleges and bringing technology education to K-12 classrooms. R1edu takes its name from “Research University 1,” the label used by the Carnegie Foundation to designate top-flight research universities.

GARDEN GURU: The pleasure of creating bouquets for your home using foliage and flowers cut from your own garden was demonstrated by Valerie Easton, a library manager for the College of Forest Resources, on a recent segment of PBS’s Victory Garden. The popular weekly gardening show filmed Easton at her home overlooking Lake Washington. For Easton, foliage is as likely to take center stage as flowers: A glass block vase filled with six hosta leaves was one elegant and simple arrangement she showed Victory Garden viewers. As part of the segment, Easton and the host wandered through her yard snipping flowers, grasses, vines and shrubbery that she then fashioned into a colorful centerpiece. Stop by the Miller Library to see what Easton has brought in for the week. “You can grow material for arrangements every week of the year in our climate,” she says. Besides serving as manager of the Miller Horticultural Library at the UW’s Center for Urban Horticulture, Easton writes garden features and a weekly column for the Seattle Times.