By The Chronicle

A limited supply of H1N1 flu shots will be available from tiffany jewelry 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 14, at the South Tower Pharmacy, 417 S. Tower Ave., Centralia. A $10 donation will be accepted but is not required.

Only the following priority groups will be able to receive the vaccine (subject to change depending on type of vaccine available — injectable or nasal spray — and quantity available):

–Pregnant women (vaccine may not be available at this site)

–Ages 2 through 24 years old (vaccine not available for those 6 months through 2 years old)

–Ages 25 through 64 years old with chronic medical conditions

–All health care and emergency medical workers

–All adults, children and teens who care for infants under 6 months old.

Workshop Assists Seniors With Medicare Enrollment

By The Chronicle

Open enrollment time for Medicare will continue through Dec. 31. silver earrings Two workshops will be held regarding changes to Medicare D prescription drug coverage to assist seniors with getting information to help make decisions about health care and prescription drug coverage.

The first workshop will be held Saturday, Nov. 21, at the Vernetta Smith Chehalis Timberland Library, and the second workshop will be held Saturday, Dec. 5, at the Centralia Timberland Library. Both days will have speakers from 10 a.m. to noon and a workshop for individual assistance from the Senior Health Insurance Benefits Assistance program from 1 to 3 p.m.

Speakers will include professionals from the Lewis County Health Department, SHIBA, Hall’s Pharmacy, and Assured Home Health and Hospice.

For more information, call Valerie Mason at the Lewis-Mason-Thurston Area silver key rings Agency on Aging at 748-2524 ext. 101 or 748-2288.

Evergreen Playhouse Seeking Volunteers and Holding Auditions

By The Chronicle

The Evergreen Playhouse in Centralia is looking for volunteers and potential board members to help choose and produce plays and other events presented year-round.

For more information visit http://evergreenplayhouse.wordpress.com or its Facebook page by searching “The Evergreen Playhouse.”

Auditions will be held at 7 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday for “Over the River and Through the Woods” at the Evergreen Playhouse, 226 W. Center St. For more information call director Norma Rogers at 262-0712.

Shop for Christmas, Help Fight Cancer

By The Chronicle

Team Remembrance is hosting a “Guilt-free Shopping Day” from 1 to 4 p.m. Saturday at silver necklaces 18139 Sunshine Lane S.W., Rochester.

There will be Pampered Chef, Cookie Lee, Tupperware, Mary Kay, Stampin Up and more in one convenient location.

A portion of the proceeds, with some vendors giving half or all, will be donated to the American Cancer Society.

Disney released a new version of the Dickens Scrooge story last week, timing it so that “A Christmas Carol” will be lucky to be in distribution past Thanksgiving Day.

Starbucks has already retired its white cups for the duration, replacing them with cranberry-colored, snowflake-flecked seasonal substitutes. Wal-Mart is just one of the retailers already Kringling away like crazy, running television ads with Andy Williams crooning “It’s the most wonderful time of the year!” Who knew that the weeks between Halloween and Thanksgiving were the hap-happiest season of all?

The day after Thanksgiving used to be the official launch of the commercial Christmas silver key rings season. Now Sears is running “Black Friday” specials all through November.

Given half a chance, retailers would probably try to get their plastic garlands hung just after Labor Day. (Ho-ho-ho, it’s back to school!) But we’ve been spared that particular encroachment, thanks to a holiday that has proved capable of standing athwart the relentless forces of Christmas-creep — Halloween. Once a quaint bit of Americana built around the simple pleasures of costumes, candy-grabbing and petty vandalism, Halloween has become a marketable and profitable holiday, putting many official holidays to shame. If only Presidents Day had some sort of free-candy angle.

In contrast to Halloween’s stalwart ability to keep Christmas from jumping the queue, Thanksgiving has lost its cultural muscle. The early advent of the Santa season may have less to do with the red-and-green imperative than with the weakness of Turkey Day. What happened to this quintessential American holiday?

Lydia Maria Child’s ode to going over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house is a silver necklaces good place to start in decoding Thanksgiving’s decline. First, there is the anachronistic attention given to grandmother. Thanksgiving is one of the few occasions left, in our fanatically kinder-centric culture, to honor the elderly. Picture the famous Norman Rockwell illustration “Freedom From Want” — at the Thanksgiving table grandpa and grandma have pride of place. No wonder the day gets short shrift.

And then there is all that over-the-river-and-through-the-woods business, which in our day means a choice between stripping for the nice TSA agent or creeping along I-95. Thanksgiving is the official holiday of planes, trains and automobiles. What the modern travel experience lacks in charm it makes up for with sheer ordeal. And what’s the payoff for all this effort? A chance to make small talk with in-laws.

The Food Network may be the only institution in America unapologetically boosting the holiday. For weeks, the cable channel’s programming is packed with turkey tutorials, stuffing suggestions and investigations into the mysteries of cranberry sauce. But Food Network’s programming is less an indication of popular enthusiasm for Thanksgiving than a measure of the fear the holiday engenders. Hostesses know that they will be judged on the juiciness of their turkey, the cooking of which is an exotic undertaking chanced but once a year. And the result must be achieved while juggling a half-dozen side dishes, all the while making the above-mentioned small talk.

None of which would be so daunting if the day meant more to us. Could it be we’ve lost our capacity for gratitude? A successful harvest occasioned thanks back when it was all that stood between us and a long, cold, hungry winter. But now we’re divorced from the seasonal rhythms of the farm, where the harvest is celebrated as the payoff of all the year’s labors. Even in the midst of this Great Repression we enjoy perpetual plenty. What resonance does a cornucopia have to people who have come to expect ripe blackberries in February? If anything, bangles we should be more grateful, but that’s not our nature. Anything we struggle for, we hold dear; anything that comes easy, we take for granted.

Not only don’t we celebrate the astonishing abundance that is our good fortune, we whine and moan about how it makes us fat. Lydia Maria Child’s poem ends, appropriately enough, with dessert: “Is the pudding done? / Hurrah for the pumpkin pie!” A version for our time would read, “Is the pudding sugar-free?” And if that weren’t enough to squeeze the pleasure from the day, no modern Thanksgiving is complete without a college student home from school, lecturing the family on the cruelty of meat. (To which the only appropriate response is: “Does that mean you don’t want the drumstick?”) That same sophomore is also likely to bemoan the grim fate of the Native Americans who made the strategic mistake of helping the Pilgrims avoid starvation. In some circles, Thanksgiving is second only to Columbus Day as an occasion for grieving.

There will be plenty of time next month for all the secular manifestations of Christmas: shopping, trimming the tree, shopping, mugs of frothing Tom & Jerry, shopping, and watching Ralphie get his Red Ryder BB-gun and Clarence get his wings. Oh, and yes, shopping. But before we break out the ornaments and dust off the Vince Guaraldi soundtrack, let’s make the most of autumn and its particular pleasures. Jump in a pile of leaves. Savor the waning daylight. And go ahead. Week after next, eat that second slice of pumpkin pie — just be thankful for rings it.

The area had been at risk of losing some of its traditional character. Behind the ranks of wedding ring retailers at street level, small basement and upper floor workshops have been closing for years as landlords convert premises to commercial office space.

But prescriptive planning policies adopted by Camden council have started to reverse the trend, creating workshop space and fostering a wave of start-up jewellery businesses.

The council has also handed out grants to about 70 jewellers to invest in new technology, silver money clips established a network to help businesses subcontract within the cluster and supported training courses, including the first NVQ in jewellery-making, to bring fresh blood into the industry. Now it is seeking to rebrand Hatton Garden.

“There’s a misconception that Hatton Garden is just about wedding rings, but it’s the place to come to commission jewellery whether your budget is 50 or 50,000,” said Fiona McKeith, Camden’s jewellery sector development manager. “Now it’s about driving footfall and repositioning Hatton Garden in the consumer mind. There’s an amazing wealth of design talent here.”

About 500 jewellery-related businesses are in Hatton Garden, including 150 manufacturers, mostly microbusinesses employing up to four people in specialist areas such as polishing or setting.

Research into the sector a few years ago found that the most pressing worry for 60 per cent of businesses was not being able to relocate within Hatton Garden because of the erosion in the number of workshops.

“Businesses were being forced out of Hatton Garden,” said Ms McKeith. “And the companies silver pendants here feel that if they are not located near Hatton Garden, they will fail.” Four years ago Camden revised its development ban on changing the use of buildings from commercial to residential. Instead, it obliged developers to return 50 per cent of building space to use as affordable workshops. Where buildings are too small for that, the council receives a financial contribution.

As a result, it has secured 2,600 square metres of affordable space, including a 32-workshop building that has just been refurbished. Still more space, aimed at creating a hub for manufacturers and new designers, is due to open this month.

Since moving to the Langdales Jewellery Centre on St Cross Street, which has supported 10 start-ups and rehoused four craft manufacturers since it opened in 2007, Tony Lark and Warren Heathcote of A&W Setters have seen an upturn in their business in spite of the recession, as well as received help investing in technology.

As he worked on a pendant set containing hundreds of tiny diamonds, Mr Heathcote said: “We have silver earrings had grants that helped us upgrade the microscopes and buy precision drills. We can get a much more precise setting and so we get better quality jobs.

“Before we were in Farringdon Road and it’s just that step away, so customers don’t want to go there. It make a huge difference [being at the heart of Hatton Garden].”

Nearby, Jewelworks, a jewellery repairer and be-spoke manufacturer, is expanding. Though retail sales across the sector are hit by the downturn, Jewelworks’ sales are up 25 per cent as more clients repair or restore jewellery. Nick Gray, its owner, plans to develop the business into a repair hub and explore more direct contact with customers, rather than working solely through independent stores and large chains.

The company’s competitiveness has improved since it incorporated computer-aided design and installed a laser welder – bought with the help of Camden grants – enabling it to produce designs quickly and take on more sophisticated work.

Alan Elkins, Jewelworks’ workshop manager, said: “I’m 50 years old and have been in the trade all my life silver key rings and I can see this [laser machine] will let us do work that we simply couldn’t do before.”

Now the challenge for Hatton Garden, which held is first festival this summer as part of Coutts London Jewellery Week, is to change its retail face to rival Bond Street and create more galleries, says Ms McKeith. To this end, Platform, a not-for-profit information centre and contemporary jewellery showcase space, opened recently.

Ms McKeith added: “What is presented to the customer as the retail offer does not reflect what is going on behind the scenes.”

Bespoke designs shine through retail gloom

Elizabeth Powell (below right) is realising her dream of running her own jewellery design and manufacturing business. Unperturbed by the retail gloom on the high street, the 29-year-old has just launched her first collection of rings, pendants and earrings after working on bespoke designs for the past two years.

She began in a communal start-up provided by Camden council, before moving to a workshop in Nicholas James, the largest contemporary jewellery store in Hatton Garden.

“It’s been quite a long process setting up,” she said. “It can be difficult to find workshop space.”

Apart from the specialist jewel-setting, she does all the manufacturing and design work herself. She describes silver necklaces her pieces, which retail at between 500 and 5,000, as “affordable luxury”. Ms Powell plans to open her own shop in the area this month to display her work and that of other emerging designers.

“Hatton Garden is changing and evolving. There is a greater appreciation of contemporary design here now,” she says

Credit: By Bob Sherwood, London and South-East Correspondent

“Although the indictment does not mention Orlando, it is part of our investigation,” said Lymarie V. Llovet-Ayala, U.S. Attorney’s spokeswoman in Puerto Rico. “That information will be released later.”

Preliminary reports show one of the American Airlines employees arrested in Miami, Jose Manuel Colon-Martinez, traveled back and forth between Miami and Orlando. Colon-Martinez listed an Orlando address between 1999 and 2008.

Jail records show Florida Highway Patrol troopers arrested him in 2005 for possession silver pendants of marijuana, but adjudication was withheld. He served six months of supervised probation and community service, but later violated those terms. He was sentenced to nearly seven months at the Orange County Jail.

American Airlines spokesman Tim Wagner could not confirm how long Colon-Martinez worked for American Airlines or if he worked for the company at Orlando International Airport while he lived in Orlando.

“Our privacy policies prevent us from discussing specific employees and details,” Wagner wrote in an e-mail to the Orlando Sentinel. “We can confirm that there were some drug smuggling-related arrests in both San Juan and Miami yesterday. We have been working with authorities.”

Wagner also wrote that Tueday’s arrests of the airline’s employees “don’t reflect negatively silver earrings on the tens of thousands of ethical American Airlines employees who work hard to serve the public daily.”

American Airlines is the biggest U.S. carrier in Latin America and the Caribbean, according to U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

The 19-page indictment on Operation Heavy Cargo shows a federal grand jury indicted the suspects on Sept. 9. Agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bayamon Drug Force, the Puerto Rico Police Department and the FBI arrested the suspects Tuesday in Miami and Puerto Rico.

Llovet-Ayala said all of the suspects are residents of Puerto Rico. It is unclear if any of those arrested have ties to Orlando or other parts of Central Florida.

In Orlando, an airport spokeswoman said she was unaware of any airline workers being involved in the drug bust.

The narcotics ring began their operation in 1999 and smuggled more than $19 million in cocaine from Puerto Rico into the United States through Orlando and Miami, authorities said.

The four-count indictment shows suspected ringleader, Wilfredo Rodriguez Rosario, recruited several American Airlines employees to oversee that suitcases loaded with cocaine were later distributed across the U.S.

The indictment also includes an $18 million forfeiture count for property throughout Puerto Rico, including several homes and businesses in Morovis, Bayamon and Barceloneta.

Orlando International Airport has served as a gateway allowing criminals to exchange guns and drugs between Puerto Rico and Orlando in the past.

Hiram Rivera-Ortiz , a former Puerto Rico police officer working for JetBlue, had accepted $4,500 in July 2007 to smuggle four pistols and two submachine guns aboard a San Juan flight, according to federal court records. Rivera-Ortiz is serving nearly six years in federal prison. silver key rings

Agents confiscated 14 guns and 8 pounds of marijuana that had been smuggled aboard a Delta flight to San Juan in March 2007. Two of the four suspects arrested in that case had worked for Comair. Court records show they smuggled a 20-pound package of marijuana aboard a flight to Puerto Rico twice a month.

Those arrests prompted a congressional review that mandated a full review of security procedures at the nation’s airports.

The Greater Orlando Aviation Authority and the Transportation Security Administration shortly afterward began full-scale screenings of all airport employees, contractors and vendors entering secure areas, especially baggage carousels.

Here are the names of the suspects arrested in Tuesday’s sting: silver necklaces

–Wilfredo Rodriguez-Rosado

–Luis Padilla-Perez

–Miguel Rodriguez-Pantojas

–Javier Olmo-Rivera

–Manuel Olmo-Rivera

–Manuel Santiago-Alvarado

–Wilfredo Santiago-Rios

–Jose D. Cordero-San Miguel

–Braulio Burgos-Salgado

–Luis A. Rivera-Quinonez

–Gerardo Torres-Rodriguez

–Gerardo Negron-Barreto

–Ramon Luis Ortiz-Rivera

–Orlando Jimenez-Torres

–Wilfredo Cancel-Garcia

–Roberto Rodriguez-Cruz

–Arnaldo Sierra-Menendez

–Victor Gomez-Rivera

–Jose E. Diaz-Munoz

–Ehret Batista-Aviles

–Jose M. Colon-Martinez

–Camilo Sanchez Rodriguez

–Felix Betancourt Rodriguez