Newport

Yet another beautiful weekend in Oregon this winter. Mary and I headed to Newport for the afternoon to take a nice, long walk on the beach. Unfortunately, the wind was blowing at a steady 15-20 miles per hour, so our walk was short.

But we had a yummy bowl of chowder, some homemade ice cream, and stopped by a couple of nice little shops. Truth be told, the shops were more up Mary's alley - mostly having the home decorating spin. There were pretty cloths, glassware, (women's) clothing, etc. The shop I was most interested in was the needlework shop, the Twining Thread. Like most shops of its type, it focuses primarily on cross-stitch, but it had a few books and magazines on embroidery (my gig).

Joey remembered us, or at least made a good guess (b/c we've only been in once before, about a year ago). She and her husband own and have run the shop since 2003. She's very enthusiastic about needlework, but she's realistic about the business side of things. So, about a year ago, they created their web page, and it's now the major source of their revenue. Joey was very excited about the web page (it's nice and simple) and we chatted about it (and web business in general) for quite a while.

I've heard of a way to make money by somehow having product searches go through your web page, and somehow you get a few pennies from each sale. It seems like magic because your web page doesn't show any of those products, and the people clicking on the links don't know they're going through your web page, but you can make money. A guy I knew from Intel makes a couple hundred dollars a month from this type of thing. It's not enough to live on, but it sure gives him spending money. I'm going to try to hook up the Twining Thread folks with that information and see if they can get it to work for them.

Half the time we were in Newport I couldn't stop thinking about Root Beer. You see, I mixed it up and put it in bottles just the night before. And when we got home the bottles were pressurized and ready to go into the fridge. I'll be popping one open this afternoon after my bike ride, I can't wait. I'm just a little nervous that I put too much yeast in - so it might have a yeasty flavor. The yeast packets come in a 15 gram size (well, this variety did), but you only need 3 grams for a gallon of rootbeer. I don't have a way to measure 3 grams reliably (the kitchen scale goes from 0 to 2 to 4 grams) so I sort of guessed. Oh well, it only took about 20 minutes to put together.