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 …

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

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 …

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 …

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 …

It’s time for the annual Cottle Candy Bowl!!!
Click HERE for all the info!
And here’s the Gird:  Cottle Candy Bowl Grid

One of the real pleasures of our household is the playing and singing that we often get from J’Neil.  So last night I got the recording gear out and had her play a couple of things, so that perhaps some of you outside of our house could enjoy it as well.
So here they are:
Better Days
Love Remains the Same

She sounds pretty good, eh?