Author Archives: lindley
Amethyst and Amber is on hiatus
I’m taking a break while I get my new business up to speed. I’m still posting great creative inspiration and business advice on my Amethyst and Amber Tumblr.
The Longest Day {Photo Friday}
Somehow, after all the other things we did that first day in Oregon, we still ended up all the way out at the Columbia River before dark.
The Columbia Gorge separates Oregon and Washington, and is…massive. See that tiny, tiny speck of which just above the water in that photo above? Click on it to enlarge it if you need to. I’ll wait.
That is a tractor-trailer on the highway on the Washington state side of the river. That’s how big those mountains are.
Holy cow.
Oh, and we arrived at the gorge just in time for a spectacular clouded sunset.
Night was falling pretty fast, so we didn’t do much shore exploring. We did find a short trail that led to a nice little clearing where someone had built a driftwood shelter and fire pit with a view downriver.
Some of the driftwood logs in great piles on the shore — real logs, full trees — had strange markings.
But really I mostly just stared at the sunset.
{See everything from Oregon here.}
Pathways {Inspiration Wednesday}
(via)
Pathways
Understand, I’ll slip quietly
away from the noisy crowd
when I see the pale
stars rising, blooming, over the oaks.
I’ll pursue solitary pathways
through the pale twilit meadows,
with only this one dream:
You come too.
Rainer Maria Rilke
(via)
{Get inspired with more Inspiration Wednesday posts!}
A change in seasons
Summer is almost over. The air here in the North Carolina foothills, where I’m staying with family for the Labor Day weekend, is worn and dusty. Soon all the plants will perk up for a last dance before winter, but right now, the hills out the window are dozing.
Me? I’ve got a deadline.
October 3. That’s my goal.
That’s when I’m opening From Lindley, with Love, my store offering premiere handmade jewelry exclusively in plus sizes. (And its accompanying blog, which is going to be so kickass.)
I’ve been putting every spare second (and cent) into this for months. {That’s one of my new pieces above – Gorgeous Swarovski crystal on sterling silver.} If I’m going to pull off an October launch, I have four weeks left to:
- Find plus-size models, get back with a photographer who owes me a favor and schedule a photoshoot
- Finish making prototype pieces for the shoot
- Figure out how much inventory I need on hand for launch
- Order supplies for and create said inventory
- Design an imprint and order imprinted jewelry boxes
- Line up awesome content for the new blog
- Set up the new store at Shopify
- Add products, descriptions and photos to the store
And those are just the tasks I can think of off the top of my head. Craziness.
With that occupying every waking thought, I’m taking a brief hiatus here. I hate to do it — you’ve been so fantastic already, commenting and suggesting and enjoying — but I’d rather come back in October with fresh eyes and new enthusiasm than let Amethyst and Amber take a back seat.
However! Have you seen the Amethyst and Amber Tumblr blog yet? If not, this is a great time to check it out: Every day, the A&A Tumblr features an awesome piece of creative business inspiration. (You can also add it to your RSS reader using this link.)
Wish me luck! See you in October!
The Bridge of the Gods {Photo Friday}
Remember that airy bridge across the Columbia River that connects Oregon and Washington at Cascade Locks?
It’s the Bridge. of. The Gods. (Try saying it in a Patrick Stewart voice. Even better.)
When we first saw the signs for The Bridge of the Gods! Old Indian legend! Et cetera! I did some muttering about cultural appropriation and the lure of the exotic, but it has a basis in real Native American legends after all. Sort of.
The original Bridge of the Gods was “a natural bridge created by the Bonneville Slide, a major landslide that dammed the Columbia River near present-day Cascade Locks, Oregon in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. The river eventually breached the bridge and washed much of it away, but the event is remembered in local legends of the Native Americans as the Bridge of the Gods.”
The date of the landslide is still disputed; it may have happened anywhere from 1060 to 1700 AD. The landslide itself is one of those things that overwhelm the imagination: it blocked the entire Columbia River. The lake it formed drowned 35 miles of forest and the landslide itself covered more than five square miles of land.
When the river eventually washed through, the debris formed the Cascade Rapids, which the Cascade Locks were built to overcome.
The modern bridge “was built by the Wauna Toll Bridge Company of Walla Walla, Washington and opened in 1926 at a length of 1,127 feet. The higher river levels resulting from the construction of the Bonneville Dam required the bridge to be further elevated and extended to its current length of 1,856 feet.”
It wasn’t quite dark, and I’d never set foot in Washington state, so we were crossing that bridge!
It was a toll bridge — a dollar each way. Totally worth it, for both the view and because why go somewhere and not do something a little tacky while you’re there?
On the Washington side, there’s a small paved pullout and the highway that runs along that shore of the Columbia River, caught between river and mountain. We turned around, drove right back across and cheerfully paid the second dollar at the tollbooth.
{See everything from Oregon here.}
May happiness pursue you {Inspiration Wednesday}
(via)
“May happiness,
pursue you,
catch you
often, and,
should it
lose you,
be waiting
ahead, making
a clearing
for you.”
A. R. Ammons
{Get inspired with more Inspiration Wednesday posts!}
Wanted: A small business bookkeeper
Dogma…
is an established belief or doctrine. The term derives from Greek δόγμα “that which seems to one, opinion or belief”. [Wikipedia]
We all have beliefs — passed to us by our family or culture or religion, or imposed on ourselves — that seem as permanent and unquestionable as the earth beneath our feet.
When I started working with Kathleen the business coach, one of mine vanished, dissolved, sluiced off my skin like water.
(via)
See, I’d always believed that to run a business, you had to be good at everything involved, including — especially — accounting.
I suck at accounting. Survived a “Computerized Accounting” course and did a bit of Peachtree/QuickBooks payroll for my dad in high school. Kept inventory and pricing spreadsheets for years for Anapurna Jewelry, just enough to keep track of costs and run my pricing formula. That’s it.
No interest, no ability, no desire to learn. Ptui.
That obviously meant I wasn’t cut out to run a business, ever. Right?
Clothes of Sand {Monday Music}
Who has dressed you in strange clothes of sand
Who has taken you far from my land
Who has said that my sayings were wrong
And who will say that I stayed much too long?
Clothes of sand have covered yor face
Given you meaning but taken my place
So make your way on down to the sea
Something has taken you so far from me.
Does it now seem worth all the colour of skies
To see the earth through painted eyes
To look through panes of shaded glass
See the stains of winter’s grass.
Can you now return to from where you came
Try to burn your changing name
Or with silver spoons and coloured light
Will you worship moons in winter’s night.
Clothes of sand have covered your face
Given you meaning but taken my place
So make your way on down to the sea
Something has taken you so far from me.
- Solas
Natural disasters
What a week, y’all. Let me tell you how utterly crazy it’s been around here.
Sunday. The Programmer, while getting a drink, stoops to pick up some ice off the kitchen floor and pulls something horribly in his back. He spends Sunday through Tuesday immobilized with a heating pad, and is just now getting back to functional movement.
This means that not only am I running the house, I’m on the hook for food. Have I mentioned I am the world’s worst cook? *laugh* We ate a lot of takeout this week.
Tuesday. I work at home on Tuesday, and have just closed and started the dishwasher when the kitchen starts shaking. My thought process goes something like this:
Cascade Locks {Photo Friday}
This is Cascade Locks, Oregon. Wikipedia says, “The city took its name from a set of locks built to improve navigation past the Cascades Rapids of the Columbia River. The U.S. federal government approved the plan for the locks in 1875, construction began in 1878, and the locks were completed on November 5, 1896. The locks were subsequently submerged in 1938, replaced by Bonneville Lock and Dam.”
Here’s how it looked into 1920 (via):
By the time we got there in 2011, it wasn’t all that clear what had originally been there. Part of the river splashes through a narrow concrete canal, crowned by a bridge connecting the mainland and a small, low man-made island. Here’s all that’s left today:
The view from the island was rather nice. (And more on the spectacular bridge in the next post.)
The view from the other side of the island, out across the river toward Washington? Even nicer.
Not a rainbow, but some strange coincidental cloud shape. A cloudbow?
{See everything from Oregon here.}
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