Shipping and wrecks
Apr. 28th, 2024 12:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
offcntrAs is usual the week following a firing, I spent a lot of time packing pots and biking to the post office and UPS store. We also took a day to drive up to Olympia, to deliver a large wholesale order to Childhood's End Gallery. They'd been nearly two years between orders, so I had well over $900 in pots, wholesale (their retail will be double that).
Denise and I made a day of it, left early to miss the worst of the Portland traffic, and delivered the work a little after noon. Left the car in their lot and walked around the corner to Mekong Thai Restaurant for lunch. Afterward, Denise wanted to stop in at Shipwreck Beads, in their new store in Lacey, a little north of Olympia. She used to do a lot of loomed beading, and I'd occasionally get a string of stone or glass beads to make a necklace or bracelet for her birthday or Christmas, but neither of us had done a lot in recent years. So we went exploring.
Their new location is huge, a veritable warehouse. We poked around the aisles, oogling the shinies; I was briefly tempted by a strand of 5mm serpentine beads, but the $32 price tag put me off. Most of the rest that I was attracted to I already had in my art drawer, or in Denise's jewelry box, so we admitted we weren't buying anything, gassed up at a nearby Costco, and hit the road.
Hit traffic briefly around Wilsonville, always a problem around 5 pm, then had clear sailing thereafter. Pretty soon, that changed: flashing signs warning that the Interstate was closed, all lanes, 41 miles ahead--Take Alternate Route. I set a trip meter on the odometer to count miles for me, figured out the trouble was at milepost 107 or thereabouts. As we got closer, signs got more specific, telling us to take exit 109. We turned off will a huge queue of cars and semis, with even more oversized loads parked on the shoulder. Could have cut across country through Coburg, but didn't know the back roads well enough, and didn't have an actual paper map in the car, a hazard of our reliance on satnav. So we went all the way to Harrisburg, then home via Junction City and north River Road. Later learned that there were two incidents: a wreck that closed the freeway, complicated by a high-speed Amber Alert chase that ended with the suspect shooting at the state police chasing him, crashing into a parked commercial vehicle at the wreck site, and committing suicide. The one-year-old baby he'd kidnapped survived unharmed.
Denise and I made a day of it, left early to miss the worst of the Portland traffic, and delivered the work a little after noon. Left the car in their lot and walked around the corner to Mekong Thai Restaurant for lunch. Afterward, Denise wanted to stop in at Shipwreck Beads, in their new store in Lacey, a little north of Olympia. She used to do a lot of loomed beading, and I'd occasionally get a string of stone or glass beads to make a necklace or bracelet for her birthday or Christmas, but neither of us had done a lot in recent years. So we went exploring.
Their new location is huge, a veritable warehouse. We poked around the aisles, oogling the shinies; I was briefly tempted by a strand of 5mm serpentine beads, but the $32 price tag put me off. Most of the rest that I was attracted to I already had in my art drawer, or in Denise's jewelry box, so we admitted we weren't buying anything, gassed up at a nearby Costco, and hit the road.
Hit traffic briefly around Wilsonville, always a problem around 5 pm, then had clear sailing thereafter. Pretty soon, that changed: flashing signs warning that the Interstate was closed, all lanes, 41 miles ahead--Take Alternate Route. I set a trip meter on the odometer to count miles for me, figured out the trouble was at milepost 107 or thereabouts. As we got closer, signs got more specific, telling us to take exit 109. We turned off will a huge queue of cars and semis, with even more oversized loads parked on the shoulder. Could have cut across country through Coburg, but didn't know the back roads well enough, and didn't have an actual paper map in the car, a hazard of our reliance on satnav. So we went all the way to Harrisburg, then home via Junction City and north River Road. Later learned that there were two incidents: a wreck that closed the freeway, complicated by a high-speed Amber Alert chase that ended with the suspect shooting at the state police chasing him, crashing into a parked commercial vehicle at the wreck site, and committing suicide. The one-year-old baby he'd kidnapped survived unharmed.