Craig's Blog of Destiny

“Try to imagine a life without timekeeping. You probably can’t. You know the month, the year, the day of the week. There is a clock on your wall or the dashboard of your car. You have a schedule, a calendar, a time for dinner or a movie. Yet all around you, timekeeping is ignored. Birds are not late. A dog does not check its watch. Deer do not fret over passing birthdays. an alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour. And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out.”
― Mitch Albom, The Time Keeper

Like most fathers and daughters, when my daughter J’Neil was small she and I had a number of “special“ activities together. One of those occurred at Easter time every year, when we had our favorite chocolate candy eggs. They were called Li’l Scoops: egg shaped chocolate with a “crack” at the top that allowed you to open the egg and then scoop the filling out with a little spoon that came with them in the egg carton package. They were pretty good but I think J’Neil liked the scooping part as much as she liked the candy.

We’ve looked for them for the past several years but had been unable to find them. So this year, I stopped into Chocolate Necessities and told them my story and wondered if they could try to recreate them. They not only were willing to try, but seemed quite excited at the prospect. I took them a Lindt truffle that was very similar in flavor (milk chocolate with a white cream center) and they went to work on it.

This past week they called to let me know that they had some for me to try out. So I went by to check them out. Shu was VERY excited, and jumped up and down when she saw I was there. They brought me out the “proto-type” and had me try it. Holy smokes it was good! Way better than the little scoops had been! They had put them in a cracked shell mold, and the filling was even scoop-able if J’Neil would like to enjoy them that way. So I bought what they had there, and told them to make me a dozen more.

When I gave J’Neil one, she was so excited; she jumped up and down just like Shu had. She knew immediately what they were and also thought they were incredibly good.
Thanks to Chocolate Necessities, especially Shu and Ruthie, for creating such a nostalgic moment for us with way better chocolate than we had in the old days!

Here they are, the Candy Bowl results! Click HERE to download a pdf of all the results of our 2013 Candy Bowl!

Candy Bowl 2013 Results

Welcome to the Cottle Candy Bowl

The grid has been filled in, the numbers have been drawn.  Now we just await the game and superbowl / candybowl excitement!

Below are the grids — they are all the same except that different files have different names highlighted, with the goal of making it easier for everyone to find their own name.  So look for the title that would best describe you, and hopefully your name will be highlighted within.  But any grid will do.

So click on the link, download the file (pdf), print it out and have it ready to go for kickoff on Sunday!  Go Team!

Team Cardston

Texas vs Colorado

The Happy Heretics

The Curtis-Larkin Collaborative

Class of 1983

Team Arizona

The Miller Clan

Washingtonians Unite!

If you have any questions, feel free to ask them here, to send an email, or post on FB.

Kristin  – yeah, sorry, I hijacked Craig’s blog for this.  🙂

If I missed highlighting you somehow, please forgive me.  After awhile all the names just start swimming together in a big blur…

Several weeks ago I decided that a good objective for this summer’s bike rides would be 2000 miles. I had somewhat of a setback when I hurt my ankle a the first of September, but I’ve gotten back on track, and this morning I made it! Today I rode the Kitsap Color Classic and after that ride I’ve done 2034.6 miles this summer. That’s like riding my bike from our house in Bellingham to Nephi, Utah; and then back again. Or from Bellingham to Chicago. Or from SLC to Washington, DC.

Recently I also discovered what I thought was a pretty cool feature of the MapMyRide site: a 3D flyover of my routes. Here’s a photo from a ride through the raspberry fields:

This week I’ve pulled my phone/camera out twice for pictures of mountains.  Though the photography isn’t that great, the mountains sure  are.

This first one is of Mount Baker.  It’s the view down the fairway of the fifth hole at Shuksan Golf, where Sam and I played just the other day.  There were a couple of great views of the mountain from the course, this is the only one I took a picture of.  And the golf was great too, as it always is with Sam!

This next one is of Rainier from the plane as we flew out this morning.  This may have been the closest I’ve been to it.  Every time I see this mountain I’m struck by how big it is.  What we’re looking at in this picture is the part of the mountain that is ABOVE the cloud layer.  The entire rest of the area I could see from the plane was covered with clouds.

Last weekend I rode the Red-Bell Century ride, 105 miles from Redmond to Bellingham. It was a great ride, and I should probably write a blog post about it; but I haven’t yet and I don’t have any pictures and I’m lazy….so maybe I’ll get around to it sometime. But today I wanted to write about the two rides I did this weekend.
The first became interesting when I elected to continue north instead of taking my regular route to the east. I was continuing north from Lynden and it didn’t take long before I found myself on this road:

This road is interesting because it actually looks and feels like a divided highway – that strip down the middle separates two two-lane roads. However, both roads are completely independent of each other; both have one lane that goes each direction. The kicker is that the one I was on is in the United States and the one on the other side of that small ditch in the middle is in Canada. Yes, the small ditch is the border. I was tempted just to step across to see if there was a reaction from somewhere, but near the top of those poles you can see what I have to assume are cameras; that was enough to keep me on my side of the ditch.

Then this morning, while riding through Paradise Valley, I saw this sign:

Now that’s my kind of place! In a small building tucked just off WA 542, surrounded by trees, was a “Beer Shrine.” But wait! Not only a beer shrine, but also a brewery and pizzeria. Of course you would think that would be enough, but they didn’t stop, adding a beer museum! And how can you not think “icing on the cake” when you notice that it’s also a wedding chapel! Ingenious!

Those of you that have been to the SeaTac airport will have noticed the brass fish embedded into the floor. There are literally hundreds of these fish swimming along the walkways between boarding gates, they look like this:

This evening as I was walking along, this one caught my eye:

“Nothing compares to the simple pleasure of riding a bike.” ~ John F. Kennedy

I’d like to talk with you a little about bicycles. I’ve always had a little bit of a fascination with bicycles; the first time I got on a bicycle I rode it quite well – in a straight line. I had no idea how to turn around so I just kept going until I was so far away from home I was scared to go any further so I let myself crash into the grass on the side of the road. Later I had a bike with the raised handle bars and the cool banana seats – a great bike for doing “wheelies.” When I was twenty my primary mode of transportation as a missionary was a bicycle. As an adult I seem to gravitate to bicycle riding as my exercise of choice, not the off road variety, but the long, marathon type rides. I’ve done many century rides (100 miles) and have done the Seattle to Portland ride (200 miles) once. But I gained an even greater understanding of my feelings about bicycles when I read this quote from Bicycling Magazine:

“Faith, Love, Freedom? Is this too much to ascribe to a simple machine on which we are both engine and fuel (as well as passenger and pilot)? Can there be so much that’s so elemental in something most exquisitely designed to zoom down hills? The answer is right there, in your bike right now. Put a leg over one, and you can instantly see across that bridge from adult to child. There are about 1.1 billion bicycles making that trip right now. A billion people are pedaling with freedom and joy and innocence on the grandest, noblest toy in all the world.” – Bicycling Magazine, “The Noblest Invention”

A bicycle may be the noblest toy in all the world, but it is also so much more, it can bring so much freedom and joy; way more than it’s simple design would hint at.

As some of you know, a portion of our charitable contributions over the last couple of years has gone through See Your Impact; one of the projects we helped fund was to provide a bicycle for a young mother of two teenagers who are using their bicycle to get to the land they farm, the market and to school.  Because of my interest in bicycles, this year I am supporting another bicycle providing organization.

On June 30th I’m riding 100 miles from Redmond to Bellingham, Washington to raise funds and awareness for the global work of World Bicycle Relief and the community work of Cascade Bicycle Club Education Foundation; World Bicycle Relief is a nonprofit organization providing access to independence and livelihood through The Power of Bicycles across Africa. Cascade Bicycle Club Education Foundation engages more than 26,000 Seattle-area youth per year by teaching elementary school students to ride and helping families find safe routes to school.  I would appreciate it if you could contribute to the cause.  You can easily do so from here:

Craig’s Fundraising Page

Even if you can only contribute a small amount, every little bit helps.

Thank You!

It’s time for the annual Cottle Candy Bowl!!!

Click HERE for all the info!

And here’s the Gird:  Cottle Candy Bowl Grid