Laural Winter

Routine Jewelry

Routine jewelry? Do you have jewelry you routinely wear?   This set I made a few months ago.  Peter helped me pick out the beads to go with some silver shoes I own.  Normally I wouldn’t wear pearls but he helped me break that mold. I also used the long beads –bugle beads which I don’t normally use.  But now I can’t get enough bugle beads.  I bought some white bugle beads last week. I love this set! I try to wear it once a week.    Pearls make me think about my Grandma Laurella.  I don’t know if she wore them much but I inherited a set from her jewelry.  I started noticing Grandma’s jewelry when I was 6 or 7 she didn’t wear much jewelry. She just routinely wore her wedding bands and perhaps a little charm on a chain around her neck.   I don’t have routine jewelry at this time.  I wear my wedding band, another ring, a necklace and earrings everyday. Though a necklace is icing on the cake-bonus material. If I am ill then I tend to revert to my routine hoop earrings and wedding band with no thought to the process.   Here’s a picture of Laurella and I.  She is wearing a big beaded necklace which I would love to touch now.  She was keeping me out of trouble then!

Peter's a winner

 

December arrives with hard rain, snow, cold temperatures and Peter's discipline for doing around 20 hours of bicycle training a week. Peter gears up for all types of weather with various clothing items and tools for bicycle problems. He takes off on rides in the early morning or after work. Sometimes he comes back beaten down by the weather or rejuvenated by the ride. He's tired but mentally alert after the training. He'll tell me how the training went and what wildlife he saw while on the road. I love hearing about the bunnies and other wild animals he sees on his ride. And when he comes back home I am impressed all over again by his determination to train hard in weather that would make anyone cry. This April 2nd Peter won the Hood River Criterium! There are four more Hood River Criteriums perhaps he'll win those too! Take a look at his wins last year: http://app.obra.org/results/racer/73 And wish him a great racing year! Can you tell I am proud of my husband Peter?

Quirky Photos

 

Peter and I love quirky photographs. Peter loves photos that had long exposures so people usually moved their heads or blinked when the photo was done. I like people with pazzaz or right now christmas photos. Peter found these photographs on top of a dumpster outside an Asian Dentures company. (Remember dumpster diving?) I especially wonder what is going on in this photo with the arrows on the piece of paper.       Peter and I wonder if the young woman in this photo is some kind of hellraiser because she has a chipped tooth.  And that's the beauty of quirky photos-we can make up stories about them.

Cat Stonehenge

Hi there

We put in a new gas stove in our kitchen.  So we moved stuff around.  At one point we had some sport drink bottles on the floor in the kitchen.  We made dinner with some peas as a side dish.  You can see a couple peas on the floor.  Well, Simone our dear cat decided to check out the bottles.

 

She spent almost an hour viewing Bottlehenge (Stonehenge).

     

She sat in different places to take in the different views like I said for almost an hour.  It was like we made a museum for cats without stuffed animals (taxidermy) or live animals.  We didn't laugh at her. We just quietly took note and documented.

     

Simone she is a lovely thoughtful cat.

My first jewelry sale this sunday at Crafty Wonderland

 

I will be sharing a booth with my friend Marty at Crafty Wonderland.  This will be my first official jewelry sale in Portland.  I had jewelry for sale at my friend’s gallery in Philly last year. If I don’t see you have a great weekend!

Book Review Whispering to witches

 

Whispering to witches by Anna Dale

 

Joe, who was so looking forward to spending Christmas with his Dad in London is disappointed. His Dad gets called away to help an aunt and Joe must make his way to Canterbury to stay with his Mum for Christmas.This is not what Joe has in mind for Christmas.But all havoc breaks loose on his train ride to Canterbury. Snakes that appear to be pens, witches that appear to be ticket takers at train stations and tricycles that appear to be, well, that’s some of the mystery that Joe needs to figure out if he’s going to have any kind of Christmas that is satisfying. Loved this juvenile chapter book check it out!

quotation marks

You may not know this about Peter and I but we notice the improper use of quotation marks on signs.  For instance, when the Foster Fred Meyer store remodeled they had handmade signs that said “eggs”.  Are they not eggs?  If they are eggs then why the quotation marks? We have friends that notice and discuss the misuse of quotation marks.  Of course there are websites with representations of this misuse. You can see more signs like these here.

Also Lonely Planet publishes a series of books by Doug Lansky called Signspotting.These books collect photos of signs from around the world that confuse and can cause a case of the giggles.  Check our coffeetable next time you are over. Or check Powells for his books-they are great for a laugh.

While I was looking over the quotation marks website I noticed another one. The Dialectizer takes text and creates parodies of them using such dialects as the Swedish Chef (Muppet Show), Elmer Fudd, and Red neck to name a few.  Here’s an example of my webpage in the Swedish Chef dialect. http://rinkworks.com/dialect/dialectp.cgi?dialect=bork&url=http%3A%2F%2Flauralwinter.typepad.com%2Fmy_weblog%2F2008%2F06%2Findex.html

Peter and Bryan's epic ride!

 

 This is Peter's latest epic ride with teammate and friend Bryan Curry ( Chicken Curry).  Fun reading! ~Laural

 

Team,

 

I'm going to try to put together more ride and race reports, and here's an attempt at one:

 

Chicken Curry and myself loaded up the truck with bikes and headed out beyond Estacada to the time trial course that most of you know.  The idea was to scout out some more interesting gravel road loops out in the country.  Here was the plan, carefully crafted on a GPS mapping utility:

 

 

That yellow line is Hwy 224, which eventually winds its way out to Timothy Lake.  The leftmost violet line is Forest Road 54.

 

We started out in a mixture of light rain and ice pellets.  The first real winter-like weather we've ridden in for a while, but not too bad.  When we got to the beginning of the planned course the pavement was unbelievably good:

I was having a little trouble with the GPS computer that was supposed to be showing us where to go... I think I garbled the data somehow in the transfer.  The computer thought we were riding the course in the other direction.  I thought we were still okay just following the line on the little electronic map, but I was wrong, and we ended up doing a nasty climb off course for a while.  We rolled back down the hill and got on what we thought was the right course.  Next, the unbelievably good pavement gave way to this:

 

I think you would have to be excessively charitable to label this as a road on a map.  To make matters worse, it seemed to be made up of fist-sized rocks for long stretches.  On the theory that it might be just a short ugly connection to more real roadway we forged onwards.  We were wrong, but here's a map of how it turned out:

 

As you can see from the careful diagram, we did see a deer hunter along the way, fortunately we have bright team kit, and he was kind enough not to laugh at us.

 

How we didn't pinch-flat is beyond me, but we did eventually reach a point where a stream had helpfully completely washed out this sorry excuse for a road.

 

So we turned back, scraped the mud out of our cleats, and rode out further on 224.  The weather had turned out nice, and we saw scenery like this:

 

 

 

    

 

Turned out to be epic in a totally different and unexpected way.  Hoping to ride out further in this direction sometime before things are snowed in.  At the furthest point in our ride we found a promising climb on Pipeline Road, has anyone ridden this?

 

So, that's the tale of our pre-base mile ride / hike, thanks for reading.

 

Peter

Book Review Kimchi and Calamari

Kimchi and Calamari written by Rose Kent.

The juvenile novel Kimchi and Calamari introduces the character Joseph Calderaro.  Joseph is a Korean born child adopted by an American Italian family, the Calderaros.  He is thirteen, a comic book lover, a big brother, a drummer, and a good student. He is also discovering girls. In other words, he is a well rounded boy. He is now on the search for information about his heritage because of a school essay assignment.  This search is a turning point for Joseph. I found this to be one of those books that has a pitch perfect character's voice.  I loved Joseph Calderaro.  I highly recommend this book. Happy reading! 

 

Book Review The Good, The Bad, and the Undead

 

The Good, The Bad, and The Undead by Kim Harrison

 

Now I have read a little Buffy the Vampire Slayer , a little Anita Blake vampire hunter, and the Circle series with Cass Shipton the witch so I thought I would try this series. This series is called the Hollows. The main character is a witch named Rachel Morgan. It is set in Cincinnati in the nearby future.  Witches, werewolves and vampires live openly in the Hollows neighborhood in Cincinnati. They came out of hiding when one fourth of the human population died from a plague that was carried through tomatoes. The Good, the Bad and the Undead is the second in this thrilling mystery series.  It is a great page turner.  I struggled with it because the other main character Ivy Tamwood, grates on my nerves.  Okay, I understand theoretically, if we humans had to be around our predators: vampires, and werewolves we would probably not get comfortable ever.  Rachel Morgan is Ivy Tamwood’s roommate and she doesn’t get comfortable.  It doesn’t help that Ivy has attacked Rachel a few times.  But like a good scary movie where a viewer yells that a character should not go into a cave, dark basement, or dark parking lot alone when there is a serial killer loose the character still goes out alone to face the serial killer.  Rachel still faces Ivy everyday as a roommate. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to get comfortable.  If that is the case the book succeeded.

This is the second book in the series.  Someone or something is killing witches in a very gory way.  Rachel is hired to find the witches’ killer.  Like I said it is a great page turner. Try it, you might like it.