The wreck of the Peter Iredale on the beach in Warrenton, Oregon

I took this photo on July 23, although I'll use it for today's post. It's a nice one! I didn't mess with the color or any of the settings in photoshop. All I did was re-size it. It's been a cool year at the beach - cool as in almost cold. My Astoria dress code this year is a jacket and shorts.

I've been working a lot on our new web site. It has the awkward name of TPF's Animal Jewelry ~ Hand-Painted Animal Pins, at least for now. I launched it last week and I'm trying to raise its rank in the searches. Actually, for certain targeted searches, it's already coming up very well. It's been fun to do. It's a new format for me, with a data-driven system which makes uploading products a lot faster than in the existing gift shop. We have so many of these beautiful pins that I wanted to get them ALL online, not just a fraction of the inventory, and this is working. I still have a couple hundred (?) to do, and it's going well. I bought the site from myself in my new Market America venture, so it was also inexpensive - a big plus!

It seems there's been a lot of time spent on the phone with technical support and big companies for various reasons lately, and it's eaten up the time that I usually spend working on the web sites and blogs. I've been taking a lot of photos, as always, but not posting them. The great thing about digital photos is, I can store them on my hard drive and go back and find the date of the ones I want to post. I still intend to keep this particular blog as my journal, and I'll continue to update and back date as I can. Along with my my web site, it's becoming my home on the web. The blog is faster and more spontaneous. I still love the web site and feel that I have about the right balance between that and the blogs. Of course, I have the tapirs and gift shop on the web site, but I'll keep developing pages such as my photos section. Regarding blogs, I started too many of them when I was getting started, and pared them down in number with experience. I think it's about right now.

Yesterday I started something new. I had not wanted to take the time to get into social networking, although I knew it would be fun, but when my friend and tapir colleague, Sergio, invited me into Facebook, I got hooked. I found more tapir friends and colleagues there, and a few of non-tapir friends. I can see where this could take up a lot of time, but it's fun. I just took a movie quiz. Wish they would list more that I was interested in!

And one more thing. Soon the Transitions class that Sue and I are teaching will be completed. It's our first and we're looking forward to starting our next. We're just getting the flyers together and will start planning the class. It's been rewarding for sure, both taking and teaching, watching ourselves and other people begin to feel better than we have in years! I'll try to keep updating here!

One MORE thing. I finally downloaded IE 7 and am getting used to it. So, why am I not using Firefox? I can't seem to integrate Notepad for editing HTML for one thing, and for another thing, QuickBooks has to have IE in order to work. Who knew??? So that's more of my techno-time taken up this week. IE 6 finally crashed and I couldn't bring it all the way back up to speed. The blog spacing works differently in IE7, so let's see what I have to do to fix it.

Climate change - losing polar ice cap?

It seems my blogs have mainly consisted of links recently. I've been busy with my existing business and a new one. I wanted to share one more link. It's depressing, but should also be a call to action in one way or another:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20080627/sc_livescience/northpolecouldbeicefreethissummer

My own efforts go into two main areas at the moment:

1. Helping save the health of the rainforests by focusing on saving one of the largest mammals you'll find there, tapirs

and

2. Helping people get their health back by addressing lifestyles through diet, exercise, and very effective health-promoting supplements. Maybe I'll get brave and tell my own story sometime. After all, this is a personal blog!

That's all for the moment. I'll be posting some photos again soon. That's my favorite part of blogging . . . the pictures!

Sheryl
(503) 338-8646

Evening colors on the Columbia River

These two photos were taken from the back deck of our store. Online the store is Tapir and Friends Wildlife World. We simplified the name for our brick and mortar location (or rather siding and pilings location) in Astoria, because it's the rare customer here who knows what a tapir is before they arrive, and we thought "The Animal Store" would be easier to remember. We get the occasional person looking for dog food or cat collars, and we direct them down the street to the pet store. More and more, people arrive out of curiosity or because they now know us and are looking for an unusual stuffed animal or other animal-themed gift for someone in town.

But that's a digression. I took these photos because I enjoy the changing colors. In this case, it's nearly sunset, and the river has taken on a peach-hued glow. If you click on the top picture to enlarge it, you can get a better view of the faint long line at the left just above the water. This is the Astoria-Megler bridge, crossing the four-mile span to Washington. The light sliver of color at the top of the photo is the sky, while the darker peach color which makes up most of the background is the shape of the hills across the river. The dark gray post at the left is the railing of the River Pilots' building, where the guys sleep when they're off-duty.

The pilot boat passes by several times on an average day, taking river and bar pilots to the big ships going up river or out to sea. The bar at the mouth of the Columbia is one of the most dangerous places in the world for a ship to leave or enter the ocean. It's been called "The Graveyard of the Pacific," and many wrecks lie at the bottom of the channel. The pilots have distinct jobs - there's a pilot to guide the ships across the ocean, another to guide them across the shifting bar at the mouth of the river, and yet another to guide them up the Columbia River to either Longview or Portland. It's interesting here in Astoria to watch the pilot boats take the guys out to the ships and bring them back. This is one of the changing points. Another is on the high seas, and we can't see that operation from here. The pilots climb up and down ladders on the sides of the ships, and we can see them from various points in Astoria, including here. I'll post pictures of that activity at some other time.

The second photo shows the base of the radio tower that still broadcasts signals from several stations. The transmitter room is in our building. On the right is the back end of what used to be Englund Marine, a well-known nautical supplier, now moved to the other end of town. Condos are planned for the site. I'm dreading that, to be honest, and have signed a petition to block it. I've heard that the design is very nice, but one of Astoria's best features is the river and the views. The condos will be three to four stories tall and, equally as bad or worse, they will extend much wider than the current building, blocking more of the river view east of us. Now that I'm on my soap box, let me note that in Europe, rivers become the heart of many cities, with parks and public walkways featured. In the US, probably a vestige of when our cities were built - the industrial era with its focus on productivity, not on the preservation of nature or particular consciousness of esthetics in that sense, we've backed our industries up to the rivers. When I lived in Palisade, Colorado, near Grand Junction, you could barely get to the Colorado River at any point in Grand Junction proper because of the industrial parks or buildings that owned the riverfront land and made eyesores out of it. Shortly before I left Colorado, they began to build a river-walk trail outside of town, which was very nice, but nobody yet had addressed the river as being a potential beauty mark of the town. Astoria does have an extensive river walk with an extension planned in the next few years, but here we're schizophrenic about it. We've got the walk, used by many for walking, jogging, biking, skate-boarding, and sight-seeing, which is fantastic, but then we plan projects like this condo, which will block access from the walk to the river front, and views from the hill behind and from the highway (or Marine Drive, as it's called in town). One of the things I love about this place is the view of the river and beyond as you drive into town, and in a number of locations that's already been obliterated since my arrival in 2001. So anyway - the old building is shown here in the glow of evening.

Sunday Market in Astoria

Nice hair!

I took this photo while looking toward the Columbia River from somewhere near the middle of the Sunday Market's lineup of white tents. This is a summer event much enjoyed by Astorians. It occurs rain or shine. We look forward to buying fresh fruit and vegetables, starter plants, looking at and sometimes buying hand-made jewelry and many other crafted items and artwork, running into friends and generally relaxing from work. One of the rules for having a booth at Sunday Market is that you have to make the products yourself. This makes the event continually interesting, friendly, and ever-changing.

If you walk toward the river and turn right, The Animal Store (my business) is only two blocks down the River Walk. I've especially enjoyed being close to the market these past two years. The dark blue shapes you see at the end of the street are actually the hills on the other side of the river in Washington.

Facing away from the river: On the left in the old bank building, is Mike's Columbia River Day Spa. Getting a salt scrub, facial, or massage with warm, rounded stones is a real treat!

Beautiful invasive species at Coffenbury Lake

Some of Oregon's most beautiful flowers are invasive species. The yellow Scotch broom is one of them. It's everywhere along roadsides in spring and summer. It's stunningly beautiful to look at, but alas, it does not belong here and overwhelms other species. It costs the state of Oregon a whopping $47 million each year in lost timber production plus a few more million for other problems caused by the plants. A student won an award for a process to turn it into biofuel. I took this photo at Coffenbury Lake on the east side in the picnic area. The purple flower is called red foxglove (Digitalis purpurea). It's also non-native, but it doesn't spread as fast and is not as tenacious as Scotch broom.